H&M store displays generative art on huge LED screen

By Guy Campos in Displays, Retail, UK&I February 16, 2023 0

The generative artwork on a 2.5mm Leyard LED screen responds to the movements of shoppers as they travel on escalators at a flagship store in Regent Street, London.

A new generative artwork has been unveiled on one of Europe's largest LED screens at the flagship H&M store in Regent Street, London.

Design agency Hirsh & Mann collaborated with creative coding studio Variable to create the artwork, which evolves in response to the movement of customers as they travel on the escalators between the ground floor and first floor.

The generative art is displayed across 4,200 x 3536 pixels on 2.5mm LED provided by Leyard which fills the rear wall of the store.

The artwork's flexible CMS allows for various modes to be displayed on the LED canvas. It can switch from single-coloured glossy canvases during the early part of the day to a combination of more vibrant and saturated colours in the evenings and at weekends.

The custom CMS also allows the H&M technical team to perform LED canvas takeovers e.g. for new campaigns or other specially released content which needs to be showcased during a specific time period.

Daniel Hirschmann, CEO at Hirsch & Mann commented: "The artwork's materials have been curated to have a highly gloss aesthetic, reflecting the lighting and colours of digital environments within a physical space. The screen uses customised algorithms to behave like a physical fabric when manipulated in real life, becoming more dynamic every time a customer uses the escalators to move between the ground and the first floor.

"In that moment, a series of 3D depth cameras attached to the store's ceiling track a person's position on the escalators, enabling ripples and folds to appear on the material behind them, like a trail. This subtle reaction to people's presence creates a fun moment of surprise and invites the customer to leave an ephemeral mark on the canvas and the fabric of the architecture."