WorldMonitor
A financial institution engaged us to turn the main corridor of their office into more than a walkway. WorldMonitor is an environmental motion graphics installation that runs the full length of that corridor as one continuous video wall. It is not a screensaver and it is not a loop. It is a live map of the world that knows when someone is passing, and it changes what it shows for them.
A living map, lit like a city at night
The resting state is world time. Every major economy sits on a dark world map, each one showing its real local clock, ticking in step with the actual time zone. Behind the labels, thousands of small lights glow and drift across the land like a satellite view of the planet after dark: cities that never sleep stay busy, quieter regions settle down. For a financial institution whose day is shaped by London, New York, Tokyo and Singapore all at once, the wall makes that whole global clock legible in a single glance.
Interactivity
The corridor is the interface. As someone moves along it, WorldMonitor senses the movement and shifts the wall from world time to the day’s economy headlines, surfacing the stories that matter to the people who work there. Keep walking and the wall keeps answering, cycling through fresh headlines as the day goes on so the corridor never shows the same view twice. There is nothing to tap and nothing to learn: presence alone is enough.
Customisable
For anyone who wants to reach in, a touchscreen mounted on the wall lets people rearrange the map by hand, dragging countries into a new layout that stays exactly where it is left. The corridor can read the room on its own, or it can be arranged deliberately for the day.
Autonomous
Behind the scenes, the economy headlines are pulled from a server once a day and sent to the wall automatically, so the content stays current without anyone touching it. The layout is locked across the full width of the corridor, which keeps every country glued to its true geographic spot however wide the wall runs. Once it is installed, it simply runs: live time, live lights, and fresh headlines, every single day.
Tech Stack
The front end renders in real time on the GPU: a single-pass WebGL particle system drives thousands of animated city lights, composited beneath live time-zone clocks and draggable country labels. A wall-mounted webcam feeds a motion-detection layer that switches the wall between world time and the day’s headlines on presence. On the back end, a scheduled service aggregates economy and world headlines once a day and serves them over a private, authenticated endpoint, so the installation runs self-contained and never queries the open web at runtime.
Why it works in a financial institution
A lobby corridor is usually dead space, a stretch of wall people move through without looking up. WorldMonitor turns that same space into a live portrait of the client: a business that lives across every time zone and moves with the markets. It earns a second look from staff and visitors alike, and it builds brand atmosphere without a single line of advertising.
Attention is the hardest thing to earn. CRITICA helps brands earn it through motion graphics, video, and experience design that people actually stop to watch. Singapore-based, working across Finance, Healthcare, Technology, Hospitality, Tourism, Oil & Gas, and Renewables. Get in touch and let’s figure out what makes sense for your business.