Google worked with renowned artist Janet Echelman to erect a 700 foot textile sculpture between buildings in downtown Vancouver, Canada. To make the sculpture come alive with interactive light, the team installed five ultra-bright projectors and connected them via fiber optic cable to a web server that could handle hundreds of simultaneous connections. At the same time, visitors to the space could join a wifi network on their phones and the visuals they created were mapped onto the sculpture in realtime using a single massive fullscreen Chrome window.

Unnumbered Sparks ran for eight nights and each evening saw more and more people from the Vancouver city public coming to participate in the sculpture. At peak, we had over 500 simultaneous participants, turning the sculpture into a virtual explosion of light and animation. Press coverage ranged widely from art, design and architecture publications highlighting the beauty and scale of the work, to technology media celebrating the team’s use of the Chrome browser on mobile phones and on the sculpture itself.