Comcast's video wall opens visitors' eyes

Out on a walking tour of the city last week, Michelle Davis, Rhiana Pettenati, and Michelle Gailey strolled around City Hall (very nice) and LOVE Park (ditto), then pushed through the revolving doors into the refrigerated lobby of the glass skyscraper at 17th Street and JFK Boulevard.

The women were confused.

Some guy they'd met at a party the night before had told them, "Your life is not complete until you see the Comcast Center's video wall."

So here they were, and all they were looking at was a corporate-sleek, wood-paneled surface - 83.3 feet wide by 25.4 feet high, to be exact - above the three hallways leading to the building's innards.

"It's just a wall," said Pettenati, a 23-year-old occupational therapy grad student from Duncansville, Pa.

Ah, but then she noticed what she could have sworn was a woman, about 20 feet off the ground, peering over the ledge of one of the entryways, Kilroy-was-here style. The woman disappeared and tap-dancing phenom Jared Grimes, wearing a top hat and tails, strutted out over the same ledge and began hoofing away. His accompanist materialized with a baby grand.

The woman, the dancer, and the pianist looked amazingly real, but then vanished after performing for a few minutes - as only video and computer images can.

The wall melted away, darkness fell, and the Earth floated into view from deep space. A galaxy of stars blinked. The three women, too.

"Whoa," said Gailey.

Gailey, a 23-year-old elementary schoolteacher, and Pettenati had never been to Philadelphia before. They'd come to see their childhood friend Davis, who has a job here with Teach for America.

For nearly an hour, the three stood transfixed, like rocks in the stream of office workers coming and going to their day jobs, most of whom seemed immune to the magic.

"I stopped noticing it at Christmas when the place was packed and I couldn't get through," said Mark VanDoren, a Comcast employee in information technology. (The special 18-minute winter holiday show drew 80,000 visitors between Black Friday and New Year's Day.)

But a couple of his shirt-and-tie colleagues, Chris Brito and Karl Angeloff, on the way back from lunch, had stopped smack in the middle of the lobby - a 120-foot-high bell jar dubbed the Winter Garden - to watch. Agape. Painters were descending on scaffolding from the ceiling, or so it appeared, painting the sky an opalescent blue, with clouds.

Familiarity has yet to breed indifference, said Brito, 25. He remembers the unveiling in June 2008. "It was all gridded out at first. No one knew what it was going to be. Then the picture came out with views of Philly. It was crazy."

A lifetime's experience with videos and computers may have tempered the awe factor for Angeloff. "But I always stop to see the new content. And when I have visitors come into town, it's fun to show it off. 'Yeah,' " he puffed. " 'I work in there.' "

A computer orchestrates the show, which runs 18 hours every day.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Carol Curcio, a retired teacher from South Philadelphia. Her 18-year-old niece, Jessica Welch, up on a high school graduation trip from Kingsport, Tenn., watched wide-eyed as the wall became the deep blue sea. Sea turtles swam by so close that she almost had to step back to get out of their way.

"Look at how real this looks," Curcio murmured. "I just don't know how they do the videography."

David Niles can describe the process, but you have to pay close attention and listen for a long time, and even then it's hard to fathom. A veteran film and television producer and the wizard behind the project, Niles spent a year and a half creating "The Comcast Experience."

"It was," he said, "an enormous amount of work."

Now in his late 50s, he describes himself as "a picture guy," which, come on, is like projecting a five-pixel image of a 10 million-pixel career. (He has produced about 250 music videos, for the likes of Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, and Aerosmith, and helped pioneer HDTV, for starters.)

For the Comcast project, Niles hired Broadway dancers and a troupe of acrobats to perform a library of movements in front of blue and green screens. They became the people who "live" in the wall, usually dressed as office workers, teetering under stacks of papers or spinning in silvery hoops or painting the sky.

"Is she wearing heels?" gasped Pettenati, watching a woman dangling from long fingers of rippling red silk.

"I hope not!" said Davis.

(She was.)

Nothing is projected, Niles said in a telephone interview from his studio near Wall Street. What you're seeing are 30 million tiny lightbulbs turning on and off.

To avoid repetition - and boredom - his team used complex algorithms to program computers that constantly rearrange thousands of visual segments. The result, Niles said, is that people who pass through the lobby - either daily on their way to work or as visitors coming to marvel - constantly see something new.

Apparently, the team succeeded.

"It's pretty ingenious," said Curcio. "I've come at all different times with different people, and invariably I see something different."

On gophila.com, the main search site for prospective tourists to the city, the Comcast Center has climbed to No. 4 on the list of most-visited Web pages.

"I could say a year ago we hoped it would happen," Brian Roberts, Comcast's chief executive officer, said last week, "but it's wildly exceeded our expectations. Seeing it and living it every day is incredibly satisfying."

Robin Alexander, a housekeeper from Roxborough, made a special trip to Center City last week just to see the Comcast show. After settling her granddaughters, Amyiah, 8, and Amari, 19 months, onto a bench for a front-row view, she stepped back to watch a woodland stream burble above her.

Amari, bug-eyed, pointed at a woman drifting past in an inner tube.

"Oh!" Alexander cried. "It's so real!"

It was after 2. Davis, Gailey, and Pettenati, the three friends, had seen enough. If they were going to have time to see the Liberty Bell, they had to get a move on. Heading back out to the street, Pettenati said, "Can you imagine if you had a screen like this in your house?"

"I'd show movies and charge, like, $50," said Gailey. "They should do that."