If you head along to this year’s Sochi Winter Olympics, you could be the face of the games. Quite literally, actually, thanks to the British architect Asif Khan’s Megaface — a giant pinscreen on the side of a building that will morph to display the scanned faces of visitors.
Forming one side of Russian carrier Megafon’s pavilion and looking like a modern-day Mount Rushmore, the pins — which cover 46 square metres — will move in and out by up to 1.8m to create the images. Khan explains:
3D photo booths within the pavilion and across Russia in MegaFon retail stores will scan visitors’ portraits to be recreated in by the pavilion. It’s facade is designed to function like a huge pin screen. It is made up of over 10,000 actuators which transform the building’s skin into a three-dimensional portrait of each visitor’s face. The concept is to give everyone the opportunity to be the face of the Olympics.
The building will sit at the entrance to the Olympic Park, and three faces will be shown at any given time for 20 seconds. Over the course of the games it’s estimated 170,000 faces will be rendered, and each visitors will be sent a link so they can see a video of their face slowly appearing and melting away. [Asif Khan via Design Boom via The Verge]