Super Fast Electromagnetic Flip Dot Display

Craft & Design
Super Fast Electromagnetic Flip Dot Display
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As a promotion for TNT, BREAKFAST installed this incredibly large and fast flip dot display in Manhattan’s Herald Square. The 23 foot long display is 12 feet high and made up of 44,000 dots. These mechanical pixels use electromagnets to flip from black to white and passerby can interact with the display through their body movement.

Building off of a technology from the past, similar to the audible flip-boards that once graced the walls of train-stations, the team at BREAKFAST re-engineered these components from the ground up, enabling them to operate in real-time and 15 times faster than originally designed. Users are not only able to see a unique black-and-white reflection of their movements, but hear what that sounds like as the thousands of analog dots spin rapidly back and forth.

This installation will be running until July 29th.

6 thoughts on “Super Fast Electromagnetic Flip Dot Display

  1. jpa says:

    I wonder if this could be used for braille displays (for blind people) also, and if it would be cheaper than the current models. I don’t see why braille screens shouldn’t have finger scrolling and all the other things a fast display would make possible.

  2. MAKE | Super Fast Electromagnetic Flip Dot Display | Sam Pan says:

    […] MAKE | Super Fast Electromagnetic Flip Dot Display On July 25, 2012 by samppan With 0 Comments – Uncategorized via blog.makezine.com […]

  3. MAKE | Super Fast Electromagnetic Flip Dot Display « Sam Pan’s Blog says:

    […] | Super Fast Electromagnetic Flip Dot Display 24 07 2012 via blog.makezine.com Like this:LikeBe the first to like […]

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Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

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