Projects: Big Digital Experiences Now Greet Visitors To US Bank’s LA Skyline Deck

November 30, 2016 by Dave Haynes

You can go up to the 69th and 70th floors of the US Bank Tower in LA to get a 360-degree view of that city, looking west to the beaches and ocean and the mountains beyond the city’s basin. To get up there, you first stop at the 54th floor, and that’s where a new set of experiential projections have been set up to greet visitors.

The transition floor leading to the OUE Skyspace LA outdoor observation deck now has 13 high-end Christie projectors running experiences developed by the creative shop Stimulant and put in by WorldStage.

“The outdoor observation deck takes up the 69th and 70th floors with a transfer floor – the 54th – being the transition area. You take the elevator up to the 54th floor, and then walk around to another bank of elevators to take you up top. Once there, you can go down the glass slide from the 70th to 69th floor – which is as frightening as it sounds,” says Darren David, Founder & CEO, Stimulant. “The new building owners wanted to make a splash and make an attraction for downtown Los Angeles, so Stimulant designed a series of interactive immersive digital experiences on the 54th floor.”

The goal, says David in a press release, was to create a compelling, unique and relevant transition space. “We also wanted to play with people’s perception of direction and create something they couldn’t get at home or on an electronic device.”

Two of three experiences in the transition space use Christie projection. The first is ‘360-Landscape’ – a 50 by 30-foot elliptical projection, mapped and activated by motion. Using a custom tracking system to track each visitor’s direction and velocity of movement, simply walking around the space unlocks animated ‘gems’ on the walls showing points of interest over a real-time generated 3D map of the Los Angeles topography.

“As you approach the wall, a custom railing wired with addressable LEDs reacts to your presence; the gems spin faster and reveal unique animated vignettes. They are all highly stylized like little Easter eggs. The experience alludes to what visitors will see from the observation deck on top,” says David. “We call out 20 different points of interest like Malibu, Disneyland, and LAX (Los Angeles International Airport), and it’s all directionally accurate. We use six Christie G Series projectors along the larger wall and three along the smaller wall. It gets you excited about the outdoor deck.”

The second of three displays is the ‘Infinity Drop’ – a 5-foot wide, LED-enhanced 12-point star-shaped mirror in the floor, which comes to life when visitors walk over to it. Additional mirrors give the effect of dropping off into infinity, leaving the true depth a mystery to guests standing on top of the structural glass. “It plays with the concept of ‘sliding down’ and occupies a vacant former elevator pit.”

The third display is a 21-foot tall by 9-foot wide curved projection surface with another four Christie G Series projectors. A gesture-based experience, the display playfully mimics visitor movement with an effervescent set of bubbles constantly floating up.

“It’s a play on the old shadow walls where you stand in front of a wall, a flash happens, and it leaves a shadow of the shape you were making,” says David. “Our 21st century take lets you dance around and shake off the bubbles that land and cling to you, and after a countdown, the display freezes the bubbles in the shape of your body.”

Very nice. Looks like a new tour stop for signage nerds visiting L.A.