The piece, titled “Hand from Above”, is best explained in video, but in any case it’s fairly simple: a live camera feed from in front of the billboard is overlaid with a giant finger, which has its way, such as it does, with rapt viewers. The tickling and teasing soon gets more severe, and before you know it, said finger is throwing you off of the pavement, or shrinking you into nothingness.

The effect is playful and charming for adults, though it may cause minor metaphysical crises in small children and pets. For art! [Interactive Architecture via Make]

You’re being punked whenever you walk into Times Square: The massive billboards assaulting your eyeballs are much higher res closer to ground than they are up top. Engadget discovers this, and other secrets, going “hands on” with Times Square. [Engadget]

So it’s not exactly “real time,” but it’s fairly close, according to BusinessGreen. The amount of greenhouse gases, now thrown in our faces by this giant glowing billboard, is rising by about 800 tonnes per second, which doesn’t mean much to me but certainly sounds like a large number. You can also download a widget in case you don’t walk by the billboard itself too often but still want to see a big number slowly increasing. [Treehugger]

Yahoo Japan plans to install billboards equipped with cameras and facial analysis technology that identifies each person’s characteristics, such as age and sex. In addition to specially-targeted ads, they’re programmed to display content like news and weather. I wonder if in the future these things can detect other product preferences from our outward appearances. I just hope they don’t reveal anything embarrassing, like a need for incontinence pads. [Nikkei via Crunch Gear]

Nikkei has a post about Toshiba’s new Digital Billboard in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, where passerbys can dial up a number and connect to an interactive game which is displayed on the giant sign.

Mobile phone gamers square off against other players connected through Toshiba’s Youtube channel. The number keys are used to control a paintbrush, and the goal is to cover squares on the grid in paint while searching for the Toshiba mascot.

The game was created as a marketing ploy to show that the billboards could relay data from the internet in real time. And while the game isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, the idea that you could randomly walk by and interact with it is very exciting. [Nikkei via Pink Tentacle via Dvice]

Imagine lumbering, blurry-eyed and beat-down to the bus stop on a Monday morning. Just then you notice that the billboard at the stop is snowing—alerting you to optimal skiing conditions at the nearby resort.

Designed as a promotional tool for Tryvann Winter Park, a ski resort just 15 minutes outside of Oslo, these snowing billboards alert commuters that conditions are optimal for hitting the slopes. Whenever it begins snowing on the mountain, an SMS message is sent to the billboards instructing them to start their thing. A second message is sent when the snow stops. Needless to say, the temptation to ditch work would be unbearable. [Toxel]

Japan’s NTT Communications is testing a new billboard setup in January that has a built-in pair of cameras hooked up to image detection software that determines how many people are in front of the ad, and just how many are looking at it. It doesn’t try to identify individuals, or tailor the ad to specific demographics, unlike some proposed systems.

The way NTT’s system works is that it compares the image of passersby to an “average Japanese face” and determines whether or not they’re peeping at the ad:

“We gathered together many faces and came up with an average Japanese face, and by using pattern matching the system recognises faces from the image.”

So, uh, does that mean it won’t work on white people? [Good Gear Guide via /.]

Each side of the sign, designed by D3 LED, requires a 48-drive RAID pumping data at a rate of 3.2GB/second to a custom-built PC. From there, the data is fed through graphics cards to multiple DVI pipes, which lead to six DVI pixel splitters (known as a Spyders). The splitters take video data of a specific resolution and upscale it to the size needed for the display. Once the data is crunched and formatted for the sign, it’s sent out via 4Gbps ethernet to one of more than 12,000 display modules that make up the ginormous billboard.

Each module is a mini-computer, complete with MAC address, redundant 4-gigabit ethernet ports, power supply and a fan. Each panel can report all kinds of vital statistics, including its temperature. If there’s a problem, the panel reports itself to the main computer for easy troubleshooting. (Like a good communist, it can report problems with its neighbours, too.) The majority of the electronics are accessible from inside, so dangerous repair jobs on scaffolding suspended over Times Square are a thing of the past.

The sign’s modules are split into three sections, low-, medium- and high-resolution grids based on their distance from the street. (Why waste pixels for objects way high up?) The top, as you probably guessed, has the largest pixels, at 24mm, while the middle has 12mm and the bottom has 10mm.

The animators are faced with a tough challenge when creating content for the signs, as they must keep the different display sizes in mind so the animation appears cohesive throughout the sections. To help out the animators, sign creator D3 LED made a virtual copy of it that is 10,000 pixels high by 4,000 pixels wide, the equivalent of 43 megapixels. (It’s 20 times the resolution of HD, too.) They use an Adobe After Effects template to help coordinate placement of the animations on the slash-shaped sign.

As previously reported, a single 30-second spot on the billboard requires a staggering 150GB of data transferred through the system. But before you accuse D3 and Walgreens of hogging all of the power in New York, they attest that they are not. With the Con Ed bill in mind, their design reduced unnecessary copper wiring by over 300,000 feet and increased the voltage for more efficient power. They also set up an auto-dimmer (like you might have on your laptop) that adjusts the luminosity of the LEDs based on the ambient light outside. All of this makes it not necessarily cheap but at least cheaper than you’d think to operate.

The Walgreens sign is a complex, fascinating testament to the sheer power of LED displays. While most people living in New York avoid Times Square exactly because of things like this, tourists will undoubtedly flock to the centre to observe the sign up close, even though it can be seen from as far away as Bryant Park and the Port Authority. For now, it’s something that even this semi-jaded NYC resident can appreciate.

The display, which wraps around the three most visible sides of 1 Times Square, is capable of playing contiguous video using all of its surfaces at once. Made up of a mix of 13 60in plasma TVs and over 12 million individual LEDs arranged in diagonal panels, the screen is purported to display a resolution of “20 times the resolution of standard HDTV,” though it’s not completely clear what that’s supposed to mean. As far as the back-end goes, to play just 30 seconds of video calls for 150GB of data sent from 30 computers, all of which, I hope, one day conspire to make the greatest BSOD of all time. The sign was flipped on officially last night, though the trial run, featuring the awesome test pattern picture in this article, took place on Wednesday. Check out the local news report below for some more background and neat little renderings to put the whole thing into perspective. [NYT, image from Gothamist]