If you were one of the over 1 billion people who tuned in to see the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremonies you may have noticed the crowd was part of the show. At each of the 70, 799 seats in the stadium for the ceremony was mounted a LED panel. This was by far the coolest part of the whole ceremony.
Tait Technologies was the firm that was commissioned to create the panels specifically for the stadium. According to Tait, each handheld video tablet contains 9 individual LED pixels that can be programmed and viewed at 180 degrees horizontally and vertically. Additionally, each panel is IP65 rated as well as EC and EMC compliant.
The tablets had to be installed systematically and attached to a recycled plastic holder at each seat in the venue. They were then cabled to a control rack in each section. All together the panels created an LED screen with 637,191 pixels! To put that number in perspective your home HDTV showing a Blu-Ray movie uses over 2 million pixels.
To use all these LED pixels London turned to Crystal CG International. They were in charge of creating all of the content for the Opening Ceremony. See this video to get more in depth about the content. Very cool technology!
Oh yes one final note…..GO USA!
