To lead the conversation on technology’s role in making the world work better, IBM’s THINK Exhibit at Lincoln Center in NYC enveloped visitors in real time and larger-than-life data streams, then awed them with a 360º film and interactive experience that illuminated the impact of 100 years of innovation while demonstrating the company’s vision for a smarter planet.
Visitors to Lincoln Center were greeted by a 12-foot tall and 123-foot long LED wall, called the “data wall”, across the length of which data streams as undulating ribbons of color, flashes of oversized graphic elements, and an array of crawling statistics and factoids – a visual storm that conveys both complexity and order.
The data wall and flanking text panels displayed both underlying information and real time data feeds from local sources such as traffic movements along Broadway and Columbus Avenue; rate of water leakage from the Delaware Aqueduct, which supplies drinking water to NYC; and other sources such as credit card transactions and solar power potential of building rooftops across the city.
As visitors continued through the exhibit, they were immersed in the story of S.M.U.B.A. (Seeing, Mapping, Understanding, Believing, and Acting), a 360° film and interactive experience that told a story of progress and the process by which innovation fundamentally occurs throughout history. It’s IBM’s vision for how our planet can benefit by leveraging past success to guide future efforts for making the world work better.
The overall effect was stunning, representing the commitment IBM has made to making the world a better place to live and work by harnessing a hundred years of learning to fuel the progress of a smarter planet.
The THINK exhibit, which opened to the public September 23, continued until October 23, 2011 and reached hundreds of thousands of visitors during that time. The tremendous success of the THINK exhibit has lead to additional developments of semi-permanent THINK exhibits in several other locations as well.