Apple “hyperwall” tracks iPhone app downloads

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5068157&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffff00&fullscreen=1Software 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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