Wheelies From World Moto Turns Wheels Into Screens

By Ganesh

Updated: Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 13:47 [IST]

World Moto is a technology company based in Bangkok that develops products and services related to taxi business in Thailand. Moto-Meter, one such product is an advance taximeter that offers features such as GPS, black box, and display advertisement. Their latest product is called Wheelie.

Basically, Wheelie is an advertising product that turns an unlikely area into a ad display. In this case, the front wheels of a two wheeler. The interesting part, however, is how the ads are displayed.

The ads are not static, rather they are videos. That's right, Full colour videos that can be displayed on the front wheels of any two wheeler. The science behind it is called persistence vision or the illusion of motion generated by static images moving at high speeds that leave behind an afterimage in the eye.

Displayed publicly for the first time at the Sign Asia Expo in Thailand, Wheelie uses 424 LED lights mounted on a eight spoke wheel of a two wheeler. The lighting of the LEDs are controlled by a computer that tracks the wheel's speed and position of each spoke. The end result is a video.

At present Wheelie can play 30 second video clips in a loop and is also perfectly capable of displaying animations, images and text. The media is not carried locally, but streamed via a web application.

Wheelie will eventually be able to display full length movies and other lengthy videos though we don't see how that could serve any practical purpose.

For obvious reasons World Moto's Wheelie has a lot of potential in the marketing and advertising field. With Wheelie even the wheels of a taxi could be turned into a billboard capable of displaying video ads. Wheelie could also be used a novelty by individuals, but its not known whether or not World Moto plans to limit it for commercial use only.

The cost of Wheelie would depend on the size of wheels, but it's estimated to cost around $1000 for each wheel. How do you like the idea of videos playing on your wheels.

Article Published On: Tuesday, November 26, 2013, 15:23 [IST]

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