If you watched this year’s record-breaking Super Bowl halftime show featuring Bad Bunny, or the opening ceremony of the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, then you experienced the work of a longstanding Montréal special effects company.
“When we started the company 20 years ago, activating at an event like this felt like a dream.”
PixMob, which produces controllable light-up LED bracelets and moving video transmitters (MVT), was responsible for lighting up attendees at both major sporting events.
“When we started the company 20 years ago, activating at an event like this felt like a dream,” PixMob chief commercial officer and partner Jean-Olivier Dalphond told BetaKit.
Now, he said, the company is lighting up the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics in the same weekend with its LED “human screen” effects. It also debuted its new, daylight-visible LED technology on Sunday at the Super Bowl.
“It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come, and how big we’re still dreaming,” Dalphond said.
During yesterday’s Super Bowl halftime show, over 68,000 fans at Santa Clara, California’s Levi’s Stadium wore PixMob’s brightest-ever LED badge, which was custom-shaped like a football and designed to work in daytime conditions.
Those badges, coupled with PixMob’s “human video screen” MVT tech, powered the synchronized lighting effects during Bad Bunny’s halftime show at the Super Bowl, which reached more than 135 million viewers before the Seattle Seahawks defeated the New England Patriots 29–13.
That came just two days after PixMob’s tech was featured at the opening ceremony of the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics at Milan, Italy’s San Siro Stadium. There, the event’s 65,000 attendees were outfitted with the company’s LED wristbands. For three hours, PixMob’s wristbands lit the crowd up with colourful waves, musical notes, and other displays.
For PixMob, which worked with the Olympics and Super Bowl for the first time in 2014, this marks the company’s third Olympic Games, after Sochi and Paris, and eighth Super Bowl.
These milestones come as PixMob, founded in 2006, gears up to celebrate 20 years in business. In that time, PixMob has illuminated crowds at Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, Coldplay, and Taylor Swift concerts, as well as NHL and NBA playoff games and FIFA tournaments.
PixMob claims its tech has been experienced by tens of millions of fans across more than 10,000 events to date.
All images courtesy PixMob.