Google: Androidify

Polymer Mallard worked in association with RedPaperHeart and Google to create content for this enormous, one-of-a-kind, billboard.

The largest billboard in the world stretches 80 feet tall and is an entire city block long. The resolution for the front portion is ~6500x2300. Each pixel is roughly a square inch. It's so large and powerful that it's visually represented by two independent screens. That means there is a seam in between that must be perfectly synchronized across more than one screen.

The role of Polymer Mallard and RedPaperHeart was to create interactive motion-tracked multiplayer games that synchronize seamlessly on two different screens to be displayed on the biggest screen in the world using hardware and specs that no one has ever attempted before. Oh, and they were written in Javascript. It ran live on Monday and Tuesday, November 24th and 25th, all afternoon long with games running almost back-to-back.

Problems exist from network performance, synchronization latency, data parsing/code efficiency, compositing speed, garbage collection dips, custom HTML5->output, custom output->screen, billboard cpu performance, and screen tearing. All of those problems must be solved within 33ms every frame. There is no literature about this.

It was a pleasure to work on this project. The project had so many unsolved problems, unresearchable issues, and difficult obstacles to climb. Our team really knocked it out of the park by creating a stable game server, motion tracking controls, over four playable games, and all of the mechanics in between to make it actually possible (which is a lot.) Unfortunately, challenging projects like this only come once in a while.