Sochi Shows “Selfies”

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MegaFon Pavilion

The Oxford Word of the Year 2013 was “selfie,” a photo one snaps of one’s self.

London-based architect Asif Khan, in technical collaboration with the Swiss firm iart, conceived a 3D “selfie” façade for the MegaFon Pavilion, a building belonging to Russia’s largest telecommunications company. It’s the first 3D actuated large-scale LED façade.

The technology allows MegaFon to project for 20 seconds an 8m tall 3D portrait of each participating visitor—and 170,000 people are expected to become a giant face at this 2014 Olympics.

The 2000-square-meter pavilion was built especially for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and contains an exhibition hall, hospitality areas, a viewing terrace, an amphitheater and two rooms for radio broadcasts.

But what’s most special about the building is its kinetic and interactive façade which (driven by 11,000 narrow cylinders called actuators ) acts like a huge 3D “pin screen.”

Visitors can participate by having their faces scanned at 3D photo booths within the pavilion. Five images of the visitors’ faces will be simultaneously captured from different angles, before the cylinders transform the building’s skin into an 8m 3D portrait of each visitor.

Similar to a pin screen, iart has engineered a facade that consists of 11,000 telescopic cylinders. These so called actuators can extend as much as two metres and each carry an RGB-LED light at their tips. Every actuator represents one pixel within the entire facade and as such, can move as part of a three-dimensional shape or change colour as part of an image or sequence of images, thus allowing the facade to display up to three luminescent portraits simultaneously, each 8 metres tall.

This key feature of the building has been likened to a digital, architectural Mount Rushmore. The faces that emerge from the side of the pavilion are enlarged by 3500%, take shape and disappear, only to morph into a new face.

MegaFon Pavilion

Technologies of this kind have never before been used for such a large-scale project. With the MegaFaces facade, iart and Khan have in effect created the world's first three-dimensionally actuated large-scale LED screen.

The actuators are laid out on a triagonal grid to disguise junctions between the pixels.

“In the area of a three-dimensional modelling of organic forms a trigonal structure is more suitable, because it makes three-dimensional forms appear natural and flowing even with only a small amount of pixels,” Valentin Spiess, chief engineer on the project and CEO of Swiss company iart told press.

Khan told press the installation is based on the idea of giving everyone the opportunity to become the face of the Olympics. “Selfies and emoticons have become our shorthand for communicating in the digital age; my instinct was to create a piece of architecture for Sochi which could be monumental yet open to that immediacy.”

The slogan of MegaFon for the Winter Olympics was Make Your Own Olympics. The company organised a campaign in 30 Russian cities so sport fans could join in the history of the 2014 Winter Olympics. In selected MegaFon branches, people scanned their own faces using the 3D photo booths developed by iart.

Participants of the campaign could watch the exact moment their face appeared on the facade via a website. They also received a personal, 20-seconds video to send to relatives or share with friends on social networks.

This is the second joint project of Asif Khan and iart: they successfully collaborated on Coca-Cola's Beatbox Pavilion for the 2012 Summer Olympics

Go iart and Sochi