Here’s A Much Smaller LED-Lit Sphere, But This One Is Kinetic And Called Morph

March 21, 2024 by Dave Haynes

It’s much easier to work up enthusiasm for shape-shifting kinetic LED displays when they’re used inside and do something that can’t also be done just in the creative – like this very different take on a sphere from an Australian creative technology studio.

It’s called Morph. The sphere uses 80,000 LED light emitters, set in hexagonal shapes and pulsed in and out in choreographed sequences using some 486 motors and a lot of back-end computing.

The art project was developed, designed and built by artists Nicholas Perillo, Joshua Batty and Mitchell Nordine – the three guys behind a studio called mentl.Lab. It took months to complete and found a home at Burg Taggenbrunn in Austria – a 12th-century castle that has been transformed into a multimedia gallery.

Morph now seems to be under the wing of Perillo, through a studio with a different handle – AUGMENTL Studio.

Here’s another video, via Linkedin.

LG used a very tall kinetic display tower as the main eye candy at the most visible corner of its stand at ISE, though there was and is little or no indication it’s a product LG sells. The knock against these slab-like displays that have LED squares pushing in and out like sliding drawers is that the visual effects are something that can be done in creative, without introducing all the moving parts and potential points of failure.

A sphere is not something that can be fully recreated in creative.

It’s also not outside, which has proven to be a terrible idea.