LEDs and sensors transform MetLife Stadium into a massive video screen for the Super Bowl XLVIII Halftime Show.

At Super Bowl XLVIII, Halftime Show sponsor PepsiCo wanted to create a stadium-wide spectacle to connect with consumers around its values of diversity, empowerment, and inclusion. When PixMob was commissioned by PepsiCo to transform 80,000 Super Bowl attendees into human pixels, the company turned to Patten Studio to create original software that would help turn these individual pixels into a functional screen.

Upon arriving at MetLife Stadium, fans were given ski hats equipped with a special sensor and LEDs. During the Halftime Show, the hats were activated to form a massive video screen. Live footage of Bruno Mars’s performance, along with the PepsiCo logo and a series of visual effects, were arrayed across the 80,000 human pixels sitting in the stadium audience. Helicopter cameras captured the moment for millions of viewers at home.

Patten Studio wrote custom software that managed the flow of data from the real-time video feed onto the thousands of pixels in the audience. Each hat was embedded with an infrared receiver and three LED lights: one red, one green, one blue. MetLife Stadium was outfitted with 14 transmitters; these communicated with the individual “pixels” via infrared signals, determining which of the three LEDs were activated, according to each pixel’s orientation in space.

In addition to reaching 115 million television viewers, the experience generated extensive press, ranging from the Huffington Post, to the New York Post, to Wired. The Pepsi branded hats lived on as collectors’ items after the show. Later in 2014, the same technology was used at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.