WorkRed Paper Heart
The MC Cube
15-foot LED cube for Michigan Central Station
- Role
- Lead Developer
- Year
- 2024
- Studio
- Red Paper Heart
- Project
- Full case study
- Technology
- A-Frame, WebXR, Meta Quest
Overview
The MC Cube was the opening exhibit Red Paper Heart created for the reopening of Michigan Central Station in Detroit, after a six-year restoration by Ford. At its center was a 15-foot LED cube telling the story of the station and its connection to the city: one story told from four perspectives, one on each face, so it unfolded differently depending on where visitors stood. In another room, large museum-style content pieces spanned around 50 feet. More than 100,000 people came through during the reopening.
The experience was linear video rather than interactive, and the main development challenge was seeing it before it existed. A cube is hard to judge on a flat screen, especially at that scale, so the team needed a way to experience the content the way visitors would. Web-based VR previews of both spaces let everyone on the project, from designers and animators to sound designers and the client, check scale, depth and how the narration lined up with the visuals, with or without a headset.
For more of the finished piece, see the full case study on Red Paper Heart's site. Six years earlier, the studio created For Detroit for the station's first open house.
My role
I was the sole developer on the previsualization, building web-based VR previews of both spaces in A-Frame: the cube and the 50-foot museum installation in the other room.
- Built a VR preview of the cube for reviewing its video on all four faces at true scale
- Built a second VR preview of the 50-foot museum installation
- Built them for the browser, so they ran in a Meta Quest headset or on any laptop, and the whole team and the client could review the work as it evolved