Project case study
A person made of light in a volumetric LED cube
A three-dimensional screen of hanging LED threads where visitors see themselves as a glowing volumetric figure — one of the most technically complex projects in our portfolio.
- Client
- Far East and Arctic Development Corporation pavilion
- Venue
- EEF 2023, Vladivostok
- Completed
The challenge
The hardware was a volumetric screen of vertical LED threads 4 × 2 × 1.5 m: about 50 × 100 points across and 38 layers deep. There was no software that could show real 3D content in it — let alone a live visitor.
What Awake! delivered
We developed the rendering system from scratch. A 3D scene or the point cloud of a visitor captured by Kinect is sliced into layers, and only its intersection with the physical grid of LEDs is sent to the threads. To keep it real-time, the calculation runs on the GPU in a custom shader. A visitor who walks up sees a convex 3D version of themselves; raising the hands sends out rings of light; when nobody is around, animated scenes play. Because the hardware arrived late, all content was developed on an exact virtual model of the cube.
Outcome
The installation worked at the Eastern Economic Forum 2023, and the same technology powered a 3D LED installation with a live Kinect figure at the Days of the Far East in Moscow in 2024. The system adapts to arrays of other resolutions.
Technologies and methods
Unity, custom GPU slicing shader, Kinect depth and point cloud, LED controller integration