Customizing the Experience with the Tablet

How can we program it?

No programming is required on your end. The tablet lets you instantly zap your preferences right onto the Everbright.

You can incorporate your branding so the Everbright integrates with the unique look and feel of your space when not in use by playing animations in a custom color palette. We can develop custom animations and interactions, too.

What types of animations does the Everbright play?

The Everbright can attract new visitors by playing animations when not in use. (You can also opt to have it be a blank canvas by hitting a function button or by configuring your Everbright with the tablet.) The Everbright runs two main types of animations:

1. Seed patterns can run in “attract” mode with seed patterns when it is not in active use. Seed pattern animations freeze when someone twists a dial, allowing them to build on the pattern.

Here’s an example of seed patterns in action: Discovering seed mode

2. Movie animations take up most of the board with beautiful, flowing lights. This animation functions as a kind of screensaver. When you twist a dial, the animation disappears and reveals a blank canvas.

Here’s a photo of an Everbright running a movie animation:

The board resets itself after a few minutes of inactivity, so new people are drawn in by a fresh set of patterns to inspire creativity.

What other types of interactive canvases does the Everbright ship with?

Each Everbright ships with its own tablet that is individually configured with the Everbright app, so that anytime we develop a new interactive canvas or animation, that becomes available as an update in the app, and can be loaded onto the Everbright. Currently, we’re at 11, but we keep adding more.

Below are descriptions of the canvases the Everbright ships with:

1. Classic Canvas. Turn any dial through 162 colors of the rainbow, endlessly in either direction.

2. HexPop. Seed pattern, hexagons pop out and freeze when you twist a dial.

3. Waves. Seed pattern, freezes on twist. Slowly moving waves.

4. HexStar. Seed pattern.

5. Spirals. Seed pattern.

6. Kaleidoscope. Seed pattern.

7. ColorFlow. Movie animation that disappears like a screensaver on twist. Can customize the color palette.

8. StarBlender. Dynamic animation. You twist right to change the color, you twist left to create a burst across the board.

9. ColorBlender. Dynamic animation. You can mix colors together to form hundreds of shades of gradients and colors not typically seen in LEDs.

10. Palette. Custom color palette, dynamically applied to each dial in real time.

11. Mandala Builder. Mandala Builder generates in real-time a symmetrical mirror of your pattern as you design it. It’s useful for teaching geometry/STEAM concepts.

How to configure your Everbright wirelessly

At a high level, here are 6 things you (the owner/staff—not the public) can do with the tablet once you have it:

1. Save a design from the Everbright (& load it onto the board anytime in the future). (You can also set this design as a “feature image” that the board can display automatically when it hasn’t been used in a few minutes. This is nice to have for a special event/hosted event.)
2. Select a color palette for the animations that play when the board is not in use.
3. Set your preferred animations and interactions—want it to shuffle between all animations randomly throughout the day? Or just display one or two? You can also omit animations or interactions.
4. Set the speed, size, and smoothness of the animations. You also decide whether you want them to disappear on twist (so people see a blank canvas), or freeze on twist (becoming a template for creativity).
5. Set the interval of time the Everbright waits before resetting itself. Because the Everbright is a people magnet, you may notice it fill up with colors quickly on a busy day. You can set the Everbright to erase itself after a 60 seconds on busy days. You can set a longer interval (3-5 minutes) for days when you know it’s not as busy, or when you’re having a special event.

Note: You do not need internet access to use the tablet. The Everbright app connects to the Everbright’s private wifi signal, which is similar to a bluetooth and has no relation to your building’s internet.

We can develop custom, unique interactions specific to your brand.

The Everbright is a true “interactive canvas,” meaning pixels can be interactive with each other—globally addressable by twisting—in addition to being individually addressable.

For example:

A healthcare organization commissioned a number of custom animations evoking important themes to their visitors. Here are a few of the animations we developed for them:

Tree of life (a twist pauses the animation, allowing the user to use the tree as inspiration for their own design).

Cake, commemorating and celebrating the occasion of their first visit. Again, a twist pauses the animation.

A global firm asked us to create a custom, abstract animation to evoke their logo.

We turned the colors and shapes of their logo into an abstract animation that evokes their logo and their brand.
We can evoke the logo, the mood, and the qualities and themes your brand represents by developing custom animations using gradient color flows. We’ve taken this direction for a number of brands in the past. The gradient color flows do a nice job of “faking” the logo without being too.

 

Do you have a team of designers who live inside of Adobe Illustrator?

You can create your own interactive artwork.

(Using this Everbright animation template.)

Here is an Illustrator template that will allow your team to create their own interactive artwork. Once we receive the file, we can load it onto the Everbright App after doing some basic color corrections.

This will allow everyone to review and approve animations in advance.

These animations can be loaded wirelessly onto the Everbright by simply updating the tablet whenever new animations are ready.

Not only can you upload animations wirelessly using the tablet/app, but you can also use the app to wirelessly adjust the speed of the animations at any time.

Here are some guidelines on how to use this Illustrator template:

1. Do not change the locked background layer “Everbright Classic Background.”
2. Add your art to new Layers by placing circles that are ~14 pixels in diameter on top of the black circles on the background layer.
3. When creating your art, be sure each circle is filled with a solid color (no gradients within a pixel). The circles should be as concentric as possible. However, they do not need to be perfectly placed on the black background pixels. When the images are converted to animations, the pixel color is sampled from the middle of the pixel.
4. Place each frame of your animation on a separate layer.
5. When your animation is complete, export each frame as a .jpg file which must be 680×347 pixels. If you have created additional layers for each frame, you will need to hide the layers of the frames you are not exporting, but be sure to always leave the background layer visible. Each jpg must have a file name in this format: <title>Classic_<n>.jpg where,<title> is a single word descriptor starting with a capital letter and <n> is the frame number starting with 1. For example, a three-frame animation of a dog would have three files: DogClassic_1.jpg, DogClassic_2.jpg, and DogClassic_3.jpg.
6. Submit your Illustrator file and the associated exported images in a single compressed folder with the name <Title>Classic. In the previous example, the folder containing the illustrator template and images would be called DogClassic and the compressed file should be called DogClassic.zip