Cogappers, friends and clients alike enjoyed a festive and quirky evening last Thursday at our Christmas Party, held at The Basement, a local multi-use arts space.  As well as the excellent cocktails and music that had partygoers dancing the night away, the event gave attendees the opportunity to try their hand at Digital Graffiti:

Some of the many designs created during the course of the evening, more of which can be seen on our Flickr.  Also in photo: one of Tristan Roddis's colour-changing LED balloons.

Don't worry, no walls were actually defaced - users created these ephemeral images by pointing a laser pen, not a spray can, at the wall.  Put simply, it works like this: a camera at the back of the room tracks the light of the laser pen, this information is interpreted by a computer, and nanoseconds later, graffiti is "drawn" onto the wall using a projector.

The system, "L.A.S.E.R. Tag", was created by some very brainy and rather subversive people at the Graffiti Research Lab.  This particular group use the technology to temporarily deface important landmarks, before they get chased off by the police.  They've been nice enough to open source the project, and you can download the code yourself here.

Cogapp is no stranger to the wonders of digital projection, having dabbled in similar technologies for past projects and more.  At our 20th Birthday celebrations at London's ICA in 2006, guests submitted messages of their choice via a computer or by text message.  At some point in the evening the queued messages would be projected dynamically across the wall, creating an interactive installation.

User-generated projections at the 20/20 celebration.

We've also used digital projection techniques on some of our client-facing projects. The Prudential Eye, a unique multimedia art installation completed by Cogapp last year, features film, images and text projected onto an ultra-widescreen piece of glass.  We built a bespoke display engine to animate and project the content onto the specially created holographic glass, which is the largest of its kind in Europe.  Ian Smith has written a series of posts on the creation of the project, so you can learn more about it here.

Senior Designer Ben Aquilina standing behind the HoloPro glass.

We're ever on the lookout for technologies that get us creating fresh (and fun!) ways to visualise information, preferably ones which get everyone involved.  Watch this space.