NOVA, a project from the 150-Jahr-Jubilee of the ETH Zurich, is that world-wide first three-dimensional, bivalent color display. The Six tons heavy lightobject can not only display abstract visualizations, but also photographic and cinematic picture sequences. It will hang three years in the Zurich station hall.
NOVA is a right parallelepiped with a surface area of five times five meters and a height of a meter. 25000 individually addressable light balls can light up in more than 16 million colors. Common are two-dimensional displays, which are already present in the main station. Three-dimensional structures with large depth of shade and the characteristic, as two-dimensional displays to likewise function (bivalent displays so mentioned), are still unknown. This three-dimensional structure was selected, because under any circumstances a further wall-like structure in the main station should not be installed. The pictures shown on the display are renewed with a frequency by 25 cycles per second, i.e., dynamic procedures can be shown.
The idea for the object comes from Horao GmbH, a future spin off of the ETH Zurich. The development of the technical overall system as well as the hardware comes from the ETH close Supercomputing System AG, and the software was developed at the computer Graphics Laboratory of the ETH Zurich. Research results from 17 different institutes flowed meanwhile into the project, and the development still continues.
Thanks to Oliver Schürer for the hint!
More Information via: horao.biz
This project has been shown at the Media Facades Exhbition Berlin 2008 and was published in the Exhibition Companion (download the Catalogue Pdf – 7 Mb).