Space Needle — A Decade of Every Medium
The problem
One landmark client, a decade of shifting media — each new engagement needed whatever medium had just become possible.
The approach
Stay with the client through every format change rather than selling one technique.
What was built
Seven engagements: Zoomable City gigapixel kiosk (2014), long-term timelapse (2016), VR Block Party, VR Bar (2017), VR bungee (2018), Loupe Lounge (2023), AI production (2025–26).
The outcome
A continuous Space Needle relationship from 2014 to the present, now running through Bespoken AI Solutions.
Seven engagements with the same client over more than a decade, each using whatever medium was current at the time:
2014 — Zoomable City. Panogs installed a temporary gigapixel capture system above the Space Needle’s aircraft beacon, shooting and stitching over 3,000 individual images into a single ultra-high-resolution panorama of Seattle. The finished image powered the Zoomable City touchscreen kiosk, built with partner company Stimulant, where Observation Deck visitors could explore the city and its points of interest. (Corrected 2026-07-14: earlier site copy attributed this capture work to Microsoft Research/Stimulant alone — confirmed with Gavin directly that Panogs did the gigapixel capture, with Stimulant building the kiosk software on top of it.)
2016 — The Fifty Year Cam. Working with Seitz of Switzerland, Panogs mounted a Livecam D2 360° timelapse system atop the Space Needle, capturing detailed panoramas of the Seattle skyline every ten minutes — piped into an interactive touchscreen kiosk. The goal, per Panogs’ own project notes: keep the camera running for 50 years, documenting the growth of the Pacific Northwest’s largest city.
c. 2016–17 — Seattle Center VR Block Party. The first VR marketing video for the Seattle Center Block Party — technically demanding work that included driving a custom rover through the Chihuly Garden of Glass museum, remote-controlling a GoPro Omni across a 600-foot zipline span, and rigging a 30-foot timelapse system off the Space Needle’s lower roof.
2017 — The VR Bar. Launched in October 2017 “in partnership with Panogs and Graffix,” per the Space Needle’s own press release — a VR bar experience built into the landmark itself.
2018 — Stratos. A 6DoF virtual bungee-jump experience installed in the Space Needle gift shop, combining Unity 3D modeling with volumetric capture and Arduino-driven haptics (simulated gusts of air on descent) for an added sense of realism.
2023 — The Loupe Lounge. A signed August 2023 Statement of Work between Panogs and Space Needle LLC for the Loupe Lounge experience.
2025–26 — AI production pipelines. Space Needle LLC is a current client of Bespoken AI Solutions, Gavin’s generative-AI production studio.
Read together, it’s a decade-plus relationship that tracks the same arc as the rest of the portfolio: gigapixel and VR when those were the frontier, generative AI now that it is. Same client, same trust, different tools each time.
Same client, a decade of every medium — gigapixel, timelapse, VR, and now AI production.
