Medstar Wall of WOW

MedStar Health needed a system to communicate with and inform its collaborators in its new collaboration center in Columbia Maryland. Stimulant proposed a three paned interactive video wall that would offer tools to dive deep into a database of MedStart’s past achievements and current work.

The design team at Simulant devised a database schema for stories about MedStart to be tagged with various topics and geographical locations. We then designed a powerful search function that allowed users to dig deep into MedStar’s vast archive of information. Pre built searches could be saved to allow easy access to relevant content to allow staff to tell detailed stories about MedStar’s past and future.

The theme for the installation was “Great ideas bubble to the surface”. The majority of the interface was built around circles and fluid/bubbly motion. To achieve this look we used a combination of traditional and physics based motion. Other aspects of the system included automatic presence and height detection, comprehensive CMS, and presentation modes

A number of technical challenges presented themselves in this project. One was the need for zoomable mapping on a system that might not be connected to the internet. Stimulant developed a solution based on the outsource TileServer GL to allow high fidelity maps locally. We also faced various challenges with pushing web technology to run efficiently across a 6480x3840 set of screens. We used web workers for our physics simulation and moved much of the rendering from standard web components to WebGL and used many other best practices and clever optimizations

The Wall of WOW ended up being very successful and is still being used extensively by the MedStart staff in their collaboration center.

Technologies Involved: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Vue.js, WebGL, matter.js, nodejs, Kinect, Touchdesigner, Docker, TileServer GL

Involved Parties:
Client - Medstar

Developed while employed at Stimulant