Electric Signs

Heathrow Airport Installs the Cloud

This cloud has a silver lining.

Published

16 years ago

July 23, 2008

Susan Conner Signs of the Times July 2008 Issue

There really is a silver lining — in the Cloud that hangs at Heathrow Airport. The 5-meter-long digital sculpture, by art and design company Troika, hovers in the atrium to British Airways luxury lounges at Terminal 5. Evocative of the technology used on pre-FIDS travel-information boards, 4,638 flip dots cover the surface switch between black and silver. A Pharos Architectural Controls Ltd. (London) Lighting Playback Controller (LPC X) controls the continuous, fluid motion and displays geometric and organic patterns across the sculpture. The solid-state design, embedded within the sculpture, accommodates the nearly 5,000 channel-control capacity and the interaction for event triggering.

The mechanical-switching drivers were pre-designed to receive RS232 serial data rather than DMX, so Pharos developed and implemented a custom control protocol to allow seamless communication with the sculpture’s RS232 flip-dot drivers. This allowed Troika to use Pharos Designer software’s pixel mapping and lighting effects to create the Cloud’s animations.

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