For its fifth appearance at the Super Bowl Halftime Show (2014, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, PixMob scored big. Once again, this Montreal-based wearable technology, wireless lighting, and crowd activation specialist provided a unique game-day experience at North America’s biggest annual sporting event, which aired this year on Sunday, February 13, 2023 from State Farm Stadium in Glendale, AZ.
The star of the show, Rihanna appeared on a platform engineered and automated by TAIT, floating over the red set designed by Bruce Rodgers of Tribe Inc. and built by All Access, with PixMob technology used to light up all seven of the platforms used in the show. To do so, they placed 600 rugged LED Novas inside each platform, for a total of 4,200 units with 12 PixMob IR transmitters and seven PixMob Kore receivers. The Novas are not self-illuminating. They are controlled by the main light board, an MA Lighting grandMA3, while PixMob’s InfraRed wash emitter outputs PixMob Protocol to operate the Nova device wirelessly. The PixMob Infrared Wash fixtures were on the carts in the ground shooting up to light up the Novas inside the platforms (see photo below).
“Each Nova pixel has a long battery life and can last up to 25 hours at full capacity,” explains Jean-Olivier Dalphond, a partner at PixMob. “That was crucial in this case as we only had to change the battery once in the two weeks of rehearsals leading up to the show. In addition, for this show, PixMob made a new device to control LED tape wirelessly. It uses the existing infrared wash transmitters to control the top-facing LED tape.”
The desired effect was to have colors under the platforms in movement. The team also wanted to orchestrate different lighting patterns during the show, which meant PixMob needed to do product groupings to control different groups of products with different light requests.
“It was a challenge to be so central to the staging. This was a novel way for PixMob to be a part of the Super Bowl vs. previous years where we would have wearables for fans in the stadium,” adds Dalphond. “Success was to prove that our technology can go above and beyond. We even offered our IR protocol to control the LED tape on the stages as the typical wireless DMX systems tend to get very crowded during the Super Bowl. We invented a hardware device in three weeks and it worked.”
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