When ooVoo, a forward-thinking video chat platform, asked us to design a mind-blowing booth for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, we knew we had to create something out of this world. Real Art concepted, designed, built, and programmed every aspect of their creative presentation, including an emotion-reading interactive flip-dot wall, making ooVoo’s booth a must-see destination at CES 2015.

Every year, CES is chock full of new product launches, head-turning demos, and startups ready to sell you on the next big thing. ooVoo needed to launch their Intelligent Video platform with a bang. But we knew a plain ‘ole video wall wouldn’t cut it in the land of Samsung and LG.

So we scrapped the idea of a monolith of monitors, coming up with a creative solution that offered a more unique, eye-catching experience.

 A 74,088 Pixel Flip-Dot Wall

Flip-dots are these nifty displays that use magnetized disks as pixels that quickly flip from one color to the other—in this case black to white. These displays are typically comprised of a much smaller number of dots. We thought if just a small number of flip-dots was cool, thousands working together would create an off-the-chart impact.

With roughly two months before the start of CES, we ordered every flip-dot panel we could get our hands on, from every corner of the globe. We built a scaled-down demo measuring 10’x7′ (only a third of the final wall’s size) in our headquarters to test and program.

We designed and created animations and video content optimized to show off the wall’s resolution and pixel-fluttering capability. The content also conveyed the enormity of ooVoo’s Intelligent Video technology, which mines video for valuable information that can do anything from measuring and adapting to the viewer’s emotions, to enabling new kinds of interactive experiences. For days, the office echoed with the distinctive, unceasing patter of flipping dots (in case you didn’t know, it sounds like the most enormous rain stick you’ve ever heard).

On the floor of CES, we installed the 189 flip-dot panels in an enormous curved wall measuring 16′ tall and 32.5′ long. Its resolution may have been a measly 588×126, but its impact was undeniably powerful.

In Your Face

Video animation wasn’t all we showed on this insane display. PrimeSense depth cameras mounted to the wall captured the facial information of attendees willing to play. Each sensor detected facial expressions and sent its data to a hidden Mac mini translating it for two custom-built interactives.

The first incorporated emotion-recognition technology from Affectiva, a long-standing partner of ooVoo Labs, to analyze participants’ faces and display their real-time emotion data. Players could see the data for everything from their overall engagement level, to eyebrow lift, grin, and more.

The second interactive used FaceShift to map people’s expressions onto custom-designed avatars. Your smile, look of surprise, or angry grimace would suddenly appear on a fish, an alien, a skull, or another creative creature. This entertaining flip-dot mirror was a huge hit with conference-weary techies.

Attendees Flipped Out

For the entirety of the show, attendees swarmed the flip-dot wall, mesmerized by the sensory experience of thousands of flipping dots or eagerly playing with the expression interactives. Every minute, someone new was saying “wow” or “what the f-!” or “how does it do that?”

By building wonder and turning heads with this unique display, Real Art helped make ooVoo unforgettable. The booth was named by TIME as one of the Most Eye-Catching Booths at CES and AdWeek featured ooVoo’s Intelligent Video as one of 7 Far Out Technologies That Marketers Must See. Hackaday even covered the wall from a more technical standpoint. In addition to garnering conventional press coverage, this never-before-seen experience was shared by thousands of CES attendees on social media.

Here are just a few of the images and videos we captured.

In addition to the eye-catching interactive wall, we featured four of Spitfire’s next-generation app demos and designed every aspect of ooVoo’s booth from the graphic design to the messaging, videos, and creative assets.