Global Connection Wall
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1 year ago
A project I finished last summer, but just got the video uploaded. Since the initial 8-monitor version, the company has installed three other 3-monitor versions (3x 1920x1080 in landscape) in other locations worldwide, and has plans for more.
The goal of the global wall is to bring together the different channels of communication that happen at Steelcase. Articles are the voice of the company, relating both to events happening around the world, as well as upcoming products and services. Photos or a video can be added to an article to give a viewer more than words alone. The social stream pulls in the a specific Steelcase WorkCafe Twitter feed, giving the employees, customers and the public a chance to talk back. The world outside of the company is pulled in from news headlines from various media outlets. Business doesn’t happen at the same time everywhere Steelcase is represented, the locations on the map show this abstraction in the form of clocks that change color depending on the time of day in that place.
To keep the information fresh and relevant, the articles on the wall are updated using a content management system. Updates can occur daily, or scheduled in advance to feature an upcoming event. The application itself was custom built with Processing, pulling in daily updates to the stories and news, along with instant social feedback. The eight monitors are connected to a single computer, providing the power to animate the information in real time.
---------- technical stuff --------
The computer driving the wall was custom built as a very powerful machine, with a quad core processor, 12gb of ram, a solid state hard drive and two ATI Radeon HD 6000 series video cards. The video cards support 5 monitors each through two DVI, two display ports and one hdmi port allowing for the eight monitors for the wall and a service monitor with the computer.
The custom application was built with Processing ( processing.org ), which is an open source programming language built on top of Java. We used a variety of libraries to add functionality to the application such as Twitter integration, handling of HD video & images, OpenGL to name a few. The end display was 6144px wide by 1366px tall.
To keep the information fresh and relevant, the articles on the wall are updated using a content management system. Updates can occur daily, or scheduled in advance to feature an upcoming event. The application itself was custom built with Processing, pulling in daily updates to the stories and news, along with instant social feedback. The eight monitors are connected to a single computer, providing the power to animate the information in real time.
---------- technical stuff --------
The computer driving the wall was custom built as a very powerful machine, with a quad core processor, 12gb of ram, a solid state hard drive and two ATI Radeon HD 6000 series video cards. The video cards support 5 monitors each through two DVI, two display ports and one hdmi port allowing for the eight monitors for the wall and a service monitor with the computer.
The custom application was built with Processing ( processing.org ), which is an open source programming language built on top of Java. We used a variety of libraries to add functionality to the application such as Twitter integration, handling of HD video & images, OpenGL to name a few. The end display was 6144px wide by 1366px tall.
