The Design Studio Midnight Commercial and twoxfour teamed up to put together an interactive installation for Samsung’s pavilion at the PyeongChang Olympics. Midnight Commercial tapped me to manage the industrial design, DFM, and installation logistics for the project.

The sculpture stood in a darkened room where people would approach a Samsung phone on a stand and take a selfie with it. Once captured, their picture would appear floating in midair. The picture would be cut into a scene with new planes of animations appearing in front and behind. The animations between the planes would build and intermix before finally fading and offering the visitor a tweaked version of their picture to take home.

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We achieved the effect by mounting four transparent OLED screens on a short wall. We coordinated the animations through a server in a nearby service closet. Since the screens were hyper-specialized rare machines, part of my labor on the project was to enclose them in an attractive, durable, lightweight housing that would also survive international transit and facilitate a straightforward installation on site. I built a sheet metal enclosure in SolidWorks that was divided into a main structural housing and a two-part cover that could be slipped over the screens at an angle that minimized the chances of damaging the irreplaceable glass on the way in. The structural housing was built with inserts for threaded fasteners and cable management, holes for fan mounts and ventilation, and had pass-throughs for routing cable between the boxes just in case anything went wrong with the lines that were dropped through the holes in the short wall providing power and data.

You can learn more about Samsung’s Olympic pavilion here.