NOVA Light Labs designed a custom projection mapping system for the flagship lobby of Amazon's Seattle headquarters.

Amazon wanted a lobby centerpiece that held its own in full daylight and put the Kindle at the heart of the story. Not a screen. A permanent installation that read like a living wall of books.

NOVA answered with an air gapped projection system that has run without interruption since. A quiet fixture of the lobby, enduring.

A wall of books in motion, bright enough to hold the room from open to close.

Guests cross the lobby and the sculpture is already alive. Pages turn on their own and text drifts across the surface as if the books were reading themselves aloud to the room.

The 9k lumen laser projection cuts through ambient sunlight and interior light alike. The piece keeps its presence every hour of the day.

Amazon's vision called for text pulled straight from a Kindle and animated onto the wall.

Getting words off a Kindle and onto another machine is not simple. NOVA engineered a custom pipeline: a camera with onboard OCR reads the screen, and a microcontroller turns the pages the way a reader would.

Each scan is saved, processed into text, and animated across the sculpture. The visual treatment followed Amazon's brief. The engineering that made it run was NOVA's.

The system runs air gapped, reading pages from a Kindle and animating them onto the sculpture with no connection to the internet.

The build carried tight constraints. It had to run bright enough for daylight, disappear into the lobby's wood detailing, and pull content from a Kindle across no network of any kind. NOVA architected around all three.

A custom OCR application scans each page, saves it, and drives the projection. The projector housing and the server enclosure were designed by NOVA and digitally fabricated on CNC to match the modern wood decor.

The on site team selects a book, sets the page count, and the system takes it from there. It has run in place since 2020.