When looking to introduce over 140 new products, most prominently the new Predator gaming line, global technology company Acer partnered with creative agency Sid Lee on Next@Acer, a single day tech event that took place April 23 at New York’s Four World Trade Center. With the Predator installation at its nucleus, created with Tool interactive director Aramique, Sid Lee transformed the massive venue into an interactive playground for hundreds of tech journalists.
“For the Predator installation, Acer tasked us with dramatizing the system in the most spectacular, engaging way possible,” said Sid Lee executive creative director Daniel Chandler. “We’ve always admired Aramique’s work, and knew that he’d be the perfect person to pull off the technical execution we needed to deliver something really striking.”
To achieve this unique interactive experience, Sid Lee and Aramique displayed the Predator above a pool of ferrofluid, an exotic liquid that forms sharp “spikes” when affected by a magnet. A sign reading “Ask and the Predator will answer” invited guests to speak into a microphone in front of the Predator display, turning the vocalizations into magnetic charges which brought the ferrofluid to life beneath the display.
“I wanted to make a dark and mysterious interactive world that the audience would step into and, as a team, we had fun making this world a reality,” said Aramique. “Ranjit Bhatnagar (engineer) and Jeff Crouse (technical director), did an amazing job figuring out the software and hardware systems that let us control the ferrofluid with 43 magnets on 43 motors.”
Adding to the effect, the ferrofluid spikes were then captured by 4K cameras and fed into 16, 4K monitors that surrounded the audience, displaying an immediate visualization of the participants’ voices.
