Quintain Shadow Wall

Shadow Underpass is an underpass in Wembley, London which is one of the main routes used to travel to Wembley stadium for thousands of commuters. This was a project where I was brought on mid-way through.

Originally when I was brought onto this project I was asked to code the backend to allow for procedurally generated characters to be displayed on the wall. These characters would be generated if there wasn’t enough people in the space effecting the wall in a certain time frame. Unity used a custom shader which George Adamopoulos created which allows for mesh object renders to influence a matrix of ‘LEDs’ using ray casting. So thank you to George for the base file which I added upon. The characters used Unity’s inbuilt AI pathfinding algorithm which allowed me to generate new points and for the AI to work out a path to these points. An animation controller was also linked to the AIs to allow for them to be animated between points. There was a chance that the AIs would stop infront of the screen and not just continue to walk across it, if this was a case there were a bunch of set animation which could randomly be picked and played. Once the animation has played, the character would move to the spawn and de-spawn areas to either be destroyed or be given a new point to move too. The eventual goal was to have AIs interact with each other but also you, however this never came to be due to a change of course in what the designers imagined for the project. Below is a video showing the early testing process of testing animations and path finding.

The underpass uses the same hardware as the digital waterfall in which the boards have IR sensors on. Throughout the underpass there are IR emitters which shine onto the wall. When the IR sensors on the boards are blocked, they generate data which is then converted into the shape of your shadow. Due to the IR emitters, multiple outlines of your body are created which appear distorted – due to the placement of the IR lights. The outlines generated are captured and displayed back onto the wall, this is known at JBS as ‘Mirror Mode’.

The below video was made by Alex Thraves and Absorb Films