Huge Hippotizer Pixel-Map on New York City's Empire State Building

This week, Grammy award-winning artist Alicia Keys launched the Empire State Building's (ESB's) new LED lighting system. The landmark building's first-ever video LED light show, designed by world renowned designer Marc Brickman, was driven by Hippotizer media servers controlled by GrandMA2.

Outputting KiNet to the ESB's recently installed LED lighting network, six Hippo HDs drive an astonishing 11,500 pixel-mapped DMX channels to four types of Color Kinetics RGB fixtures located on the building's top four tiers. Brickman's design was executed by programmer Tony Fransen, assisted by Hippo technician Darien Koop. The spectacular show, visible throughout the city and surrounding areas, ran in conjunction with a rooftop performance by Alicia Keys on a neighboring building. The artiste used the occasion to introduce her new Girl on Fire album.

The pixel-mapping for this show represents a unique development: In a typical pixel-map, fixtures are visible and are viewed and mapped in their real-world locations. In last Monday's ESB show the fixtures are not visible, instead they are viewed and mapped where they throw onto the building, turning the individual illuminated areas of the building into multiple video pixels, and expanding each pixel to huge proportions. This effect is consistent across all sides of the building. The show's pixel-maps were all created by first making one master map in Hippo's PixelMapper component, which was then split into four separate maps, one for each side of the building.

For those in the region with a clear view of the ESB the show was broadcast live over Clear Channel's New York radio stations. On-demand streaming video at iHeartRadio.com was available the following morning.

To see the video, cut and paste into your browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6gQsAlx4vU. Learn more about the ESB LED installation by cutting and pasting into your browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWQBqjuZ1sA.