LED Basketball Wall

A shot of the Houston NBA store, including the LED Basketball wall in the front window.

Check out this project on the Next/Now Website▸

Project Description

Specifically the LED Basketball Wall is a dynamic art piece that displays patterns on a grid of basketballs lit by LEDs. The project cycles several idle sequences and when a mall patron passes in front of the store, a camera translates their movement into a pattern that reflects which direction they were heading.

My Role

I created this project in TouchDesigner and controlled the LEDs via DMX. For camera input we used a tool called Zedbox which is a separate machine and then sent filtered user position data over TCP to TouchDesigner. I did not work on the camera portion but I used the positional data on the TouchDesigner end. Most of my challenges and triumphs on this project were related to automating the translation of an image into usable DMX data. The LEDs we used did not have a white channel and there was a lot of disparity between the color balance of the bulbs so I had to white balance every basketball manually. Unused in the final product we also implemented 32 color schemes for the wall to cycle however in the final project we only utilize the NBA brand colors. I did not go on-site to install this project but I helped fabricate the rig we fully tested the DMX lights on before shipping.