The Giant Company, an Irish organisation working in concert with cities, embassies, and leaders across the globe, has announced a new shape for The Giant, a unique visitor attraction concept that stands over 10 storeys tall and can take the form of any person thanks to its patented skin made of a matrix of LED pixels.
The Giant’s arms and head are movable, and its skin can reflect the image of guests, celebrities, or famous figures throughout history. Visitors enter the exhibition space where they are scanned and uploaded onto the giant statue for a truly memorable selfie. The Giant is also ideal for brand enhancements, digital art, and even as a backdrop for performances.
Speaking about The Giant, The Giant Company says that its mission is “to build an environmentally conscious global network of attractions – featuring the world’s tallest moving statues – that reinvents the visitor attraction experience for everyone, entertaining, enlightening and surprising customers through bold flights of imagination and the creative use of new technologies.”
Devising the ideal shape
Recently, the company has been working with a team of sculptors, anatomists, animators and engineers to come up with a new shape for The Giant statue that satisfies several aesthetic and technical criteria. The goal was to create a statue that is androgynous and that will look realistic when scans of actual people are mapped onto its LED skin.
CEO of The Giant Company, Paddy Dunning, says “It goes without saying that men and women have different anatomical and stylistic features. Men, women and children also have different head-to-body ratios so composing a shape that brings these factors together to create an artistically pleasing sculpture and one that we can successfully map any person onto has been a challenging project. We are excited to share the amazing results with the public.”
Following a number of design iterations and extensive prototyping, the team has presented a contemporary and beautiful shape for the statue that incorporates feminine and masculine features. The legs come together to form a single unit, meaning that items of clothing like skirts, dresses and robes can be mapped. This also provides easy access for maintaining the LED matrix.
These engineering considerations have also had implications on the design of the statue. The movement of the arms and head will be accomplished by employing hexapods – actuators that can create multi-access motion resulting in the arms and head moving to a diversity of positions. This includes a victory pose where both of the Giant’s arms are raised above its head.
New immersive experience
In addition, the design team has also been working to refine The Giant Experience, creating a unique engagement for visitors. The fully immersive experience will use several new technologies, as well as cinematic and theatrical effects, to bring visitors face to face with giants from myths and legends and great men and women from ancient times to the present day.
The motto of The Giant is Awaken the Giant in You; reflecting the company’s ethos that everyone has the potential to be a Giant, to achieve ambitious goals, to make a positive effect in their communities and to work together to help save the planet.
If you are interested in any aspect of The Giant Project, please contact the team by email.
Last month, The Giant Company also revealed further details of its funding plans, including an exclusive NFT series.
Top image: artist’s rendering of new shape for The Giant
