Pixels in Frankfurt

In mid-September, the 63rd International Motor Show was held in Frankfurt. Volvo showed off their upcoming news in a booth largely characterized by a slightly different form of graphics.

“On a motor show there is much that looks alike. As a matter of fact - the best way not to be seen is to have a big screen with car footage on it, because that’s what just about everyone else is doing,” says Niclas Bergman at edithouse. “If you want to be seen you have to come up with something that doesn’t just blend in with the rest.

“Right from the start we leaned heavily towards doing something that was strongly influenced by early 80’s computer graphics,” continues Tobias Garsell. “The main reason for this was that we had 5 low-resolution displays put together with 2 high-resolution displays. We realized that there’s no way we’d be able to match them in any sensible way, so we went in the other direction instead - exaggerated low-resolution 2D graphics on the five bottom displays which then moves up to the top displays and becomes high resolution and 3-Dimensional.”

To solve this technically turned out to be a challenge. Visually is should feel like one big space with graphic elements that move freely. In reality, there was 7 screens that differed in both size, resolution and framerate, and with multiple video sources. “We built a small virtual exhibition set in the computer so we could view the different films together,” says Anders Hjelmström. “If an object moves from one screen to a another both color, shape and position have to remain the same, even if it travels between two completely different screens. When there’s so much at stake this was the only way to be completely sure. “