BUBBLE

Heritage Lanes is Mirvac’s first large-scale net zero carbon office development, powered by 100% renewable electricity. The design inspiration for architects Woods Bagot was to connect people to nature with the quintessential ‘Queenslander’, with windows that open to cooling breezes, high ceilings that flood spaces with light, careful orientation that suits the subtropical climate. Our design brief as Digital Artists was to lean into this narrative with an LED Screen Art installation honoring the building’s climate-sensitive design, amplifying the biophilic focus, and creating a memorable destination to revitalize the urban precinct and enrich the Brisbane city community.

Our concept work first considered the presence of the tower, its place in the environment & what it connects to. We landed with the idea of ‘wind’ - how it wraps the building exterior and flows through the interior. Our digital art aimed at bringing this connection to life. For the building’s foyer, we created the macro surface of a bubble, responding dynamically to live wind data - velocity & direction. For the rooftop, a trompe l’oeil of flowing silks connected to the same live data, appearing as a giant ‘cloth’ physically pinned to the building’s corners. Locally immersive & seen right across Brisbane CBD.

Since its launch in May 22, BUBBLE has made a significant contribution to creating the destination of Heritage Lanes, attracting tenants to the building, revitalizing the urban precinct & enriching the Brisbane city community. The art has attracted local press, social media & online attention, igniting conversations about Heritage Lanes, Mirvac & key tenant Suncorp, which was named Brisbane’s top workplace - citing the rooftop as “one of the most impressive, and frequently visited, parts of the building”. It is estimated that BUBBLE in the foyer is viewed by 7000 employees each day and on the rooftop by 30,000 people from across Brisbane’s CBD.

Digital artwork BUBBLE at Heritage Lanes Brisbane is the world’s first live real-time digital anemometer, and one of the largest and most powerful pieces of public LED Digital Art in the world. With the LED screens constructed by the Ci Group, the indoor foyer screen covers 232 square metres, while the outdoor rooftop screen measures 384 square metres. To give these measurements some global perspective, the largest LED ceiling in Europe at the time of launch was only 169 sqm. So, the foyer canvas for our digital art team to create and manage was enormous - with a 16K resolution across 4,240 individual LED tiles and over 9-million pixels. Controlled by 8 different players, BUBBLE in the foyer isn’t just one video file. It is actually 8 x individual 2K resolution files, all mosaiced together with pixel-perfect timing across the screen. It took a very powerful custom-built PC and clever programming team to drive the screen art experience. BUBBLE was created using real-time visual software with a series of bespoke procedural math algorithms connected to RSS weather data values to generate live motion. This motion was then dynamically shaped for the individual screen experiences of close and distant viewing.