Four Winds Interactive [1], Denver-based visual communications company, is the first US home of the digital carpet – a futuristic technology that turns a building’s floor into a dynamic information display that helps workplaces become more efficient, creative environments.
When FWI built a new headquarters at 1221 Broadway St. in Denver, Colo., the company designed it to be the workplace of the future. In addition to the nearly 300 screens installed throughout the office, FWI implemented a technology that hadn’t made its way to the US yet: Phillips [2] and Tandus Centiva [3] Luminous Carpets, a seamless integration of LED lighting, technological adaptability and style.
Phillips Luminous Carpets is a patented digital flooring solution that combines the latest in LED technology from Phillips with specially designed light-transmissive carpet from Desso [4], represented in North America by Tandus Centiva, both Tarkett [5] companies. The thin lighting panels are placed in the subfloor and overlaid with the specialty carpet, leaving the finished product level with the rest of the floor. When the lights are off, it looks like normal carpet, but when the lights are on, it’s a completely customizable, digital communication platform.
The ability to easily customize the messaging has businesses from multiple industries taking notice. Whether using the digital carpet to greet guests by name in a hospitality setting, guide people to meeting rooms in a corporate office, announce a service, or provide safety information in an emergency, Luminous Carpets will change the way people think about flooring. This digital carpet solution affords business leaders and building designers alike a medium of communication that has not been available before.
“We are pleased that Four Winds is the first company in the nation to adopt the luminous carpet,” says Ed Huibers, sales and marketing director of Phillips Luminous Carpets. “There is really no company that’s better placed to showcase this new technology.”
“I’ve always believed that all surfaces will at some point have the ability to display content,” says David Levin, CEO of Four Winds Interactive. “The moment that I saw what Phillips and Tandus Centiva were able to do with carpet, I loved the idea and was convinced that our new building had to have it.”
FWI integrated this technology into its third floor Customer Experience Center, an area designed to showcase a variety of the company’s visual communications solutions. Upon exiting the elevator, visitors are greeted with personalized welcome information, and then directed with moving arrows around the corner toward the 80-foot-long wall of displays. The whole experience is a strong display of how powerful and diverse visual communications can be.