Apple “hyperwall” tracks iPhone app downloads
Software developers at this week’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco have been mesmerized by an installation that blinks every time an iPhone app is downloaded from Apple’s App Store.
The installation, shown in the video above, consists of 20 of Apple’s biggest computer displays. The icons for about 20,000 of the most popular apps in the App Store are arranged across the screens. Whenever an app is downloaded from the store, its icon jiggles, and the icons around it ripple, as if they were floating. The demo has a lag time of about five minutes between store and screen.
Apple claims 3,000 apps are downloaded every minute from the store. That’s four million per day. Does the hyperwall back up that claim? If all apps in the store were equally downloaded, and 20,000 of the 50,000 apps in the store were displayed, each of the 20 monitors on the hyperwall would blip (3,000 downloads per minute divided by 20 displays divided by 60 seconds per minute, then take into account that only 20,000 of the total 50,000 apps were displayed) = about once per second.
Since the most popular apps are downloaded more often, the wall ripples faster than that. Too bad there isn’t a second hyperwall, covered with dollar bills that ripple every time someone actually buys an app.
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About the Author, Paul Boutin
Paul (paul@venturebeat.com) covers Apple & the iPhone, social networks & social media, digital music & video, and any crazy Internet story. Paul wrote and edited for Valleywag from 2006-2008, after several years with Wired magazine and Slate. He writes regularly for The New York Times' technology section and sometimes for Wired and The Wall Street Journal. He studied computer science at MIT in the early 1980s, and worked as a software developer and network administrator for 15 years before becoming a professional writer. Follow him on Twitter at @paulboutin, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.