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Design

Watch The Super Bowl Audience Become The Largest Human Light Canvas Ever

ESKI's PixMob hats turned the audience into a piece of glowing, connected art

Video via OfficialWeaveAddict on Instagram

Last night's Super Bowl was the third worst blowout in the NFL's history. It was so crippling to watch (or amazing, based on where you're from), that the safe-yet-spectacular halftime show by Bruno "Good Guy" Mars was a illuminated refresher from the brutality.

Although there were no reunions a la Destiny's Child or juicy controversies like M.I.A. flipping off the camera, Mars' performance was a sharp routine that felt like drinking a tasty (virgin) cocktail: one part James Brown, one part Timberlake, one part Disney World during the Fourth of July.

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What made the event worth re-visiting, though, was how the audience was incorporated into the halftime show by wearing LED-enabled "video ski hats," turning the entire stadium into a massive, animated LED screen. The largest human light canvas ever, actually.

via @MicahCohen on Twitter

When ticket hodlers entered the New Jersey stadium, they were handed a gift bag that included a "video ski hat" with a particularly enticing note: "You'll be part of the largest video screen in history, watched by hundreds of millions of people."

The hats were enabled with PixMob technology, which can receive instructions wirelessly through infrared technology. In other words, 80,000 people became the largest human canvas of light and video in TV history--"a living, breathing work of art of connected crowds and reinvented fire rituals," said Vincent Leclec, co-founder of the company ESKI Inc. that designed the PixMob hats.

David Parent, the other co-founder of ESKI, told The Creators Project a little more about the hats: "They reacted to infrared commans that we sent from the catwalk, beaming information onto everyone so the videos you saw were in synch with Bruno Mars."

This is the same technology that was used during the legendary Arcade Fire-Chris Milk collaboration at Coachella in 2011 (which The Creators Project filmed and co-produced) when a deluge of glowing balls were dropped on to the crowd and blinked as people hit them around. ESKI also designed the LED wristbands that flickered in time with The Black Keys' performance this past summer at Osheaga.

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Even though the game was pretty much over by halftime, the performance was a glorious exercise in how technology can turn a group of spectators into a connected piece of art. PixMob and Eski kept the game lit up while the Broncos were already burnt out.

Watch another video of the human LED screen here, and the whole half time show below:

via @COeverywhereBOS on Twitter

Lead Image by Mark Humphrey, AP