South Lake Union · Seattle · 2023
A building reconstructed from three hundred million points.
A LIDAR scan of the Amazon Spheres, rendered point-by-point in Blender and shown on three body-controlled stations placed across Amazon's South Lake Union campus.
An Exhibit · 2023
Three hundred million points of attention.
A 2023 interactive exhibit by artist Joshua Borsman, built from a LIDAR scan of the Amazon Spheres and installed on three body-controlled stations across Amazon's South Lake Union campus.
The Amazon Spheres in downtown Seattle hold a tempered rainforest under three glass domes — forty thousand plants kept at greenhouse temperature and humidity, on a city block. In 2023, working from Ground Floor Studio across the street, Joshua Borsman set out to scan the whole building.
The instrument was a Leica BLK LIDAR scanner. A LIDAR scanner doesn't take pictures; it measures distance, sweeping a room with infrared pulses and logging the position of every surface they return from. Over several sessions, captured after hours with the permission of Spheres lead horticulturalist Ben Eiben, the building became a file: 300,000,000 points in three-dimensional space, each tagged with the RGB colour the scanner had seen at that point.
That file became the work. Fly-throughs were rendered in Blender, lit and graded frame by frame — not photographs of the Spheres but pointillist reconstructions made entirely from the captured data.
Three mobile stations were built to show them. Each one paired a 65-inch OLED with a custom PC and a Microsoft Azure Kinect DK depth camera that watched the room and tracked the viewer's body. The cameras inside the renders were tied to the cameras outside them: step to the left and the virtual camera moved left; lean in, it leaned in. The work was meant to be walked around, not watched.
Chapter 01
Three intersecting glass domes in downtown Seattle, holding more than forty thousand plants from over four hundred species at rainforest temperature and humidity. Opened in 2018; designed by NBBJ.
A note on the building
The Spheres are two architectural forms rarely set next to each other: a geodesic dome and a greenhouse. The structural geometry shows itself everywhere — every joint, every cable, every pane of glass — which is what made it a useful subject for a LIDAR scanner. A point cloud needs surfaces to bounce off, and the Spheres have almost nothing else.
Chapter 02
A Leica BLK on a tripod, moved by hand through the Spheres after closing time. Each position records a hemisphere of distance measurements; the captures are stitched into a single cloud later.
A capture path through the Spheres, planned around the plants and the pinch points. The scanner is moved by hand from station to station.
From each station the scanner sweeps a full hemisphere of infrared pulses, logging the distance and angle of every surface they bounce off, alongside the colour the onboard camera saw in the same instant.
The individual captures are aligned in software and merged into a single point cloud. Drift is corrected manually where the software guesses wrong.
The cloud is exported and imported into Blender as raw point data, ready to be lit, framed, and animated.
Chapter 03
The renders use the point cloud directly — no surfaces, no meshes, no textures, just the captured points as the smallest visible elements. Each frame was lit and graded in Blender by hand.
An alternate palette
A second render pass dropped the RGB the scanner had recorded and re-coloured every point by its height in space. The point is the same; only the light is different. From above, the three domes resolve into a clean overhead diagram.
Chapter 04
Three identical machines, three identical platforms — chassis, cooling, GPUs, OLED panels, casters — built from scratch in the Ground Floor Studio workshop.
Industrial design · 2023
The cart was designed in CAD before any material was cut. A solid-core door for the base, an aluminium 80/20 mast bolted up through it, a 65-inch OLED at the top, the PC and soundbar tucked into the base, and the Azure Kinect DK mounted at roughly chest height where it could see a person standing in front of the screen.
Heavy-duty casters under everything. The stations were meant to roll through service corridors, into lobbies, between elevator banks. The exhibit went to the audience.
Three identical builds, each one a Thermaltake Tower 100 chassis with an Intel Core i7, an NVIDIA RTX 3090, 196 GB of DDR5 and fast NVMe, kept cool by a be quiet! tower. Specified to drive a 300-million-point cloud at 4K, in a sealed cabinet, in a public lobby, all day.
Inside one of three
Each build was specified to drive 4K at sustained 60 fps for hours at a time in a closed lobby — a real-time render of a 300-million-point cloud, all day, every day. The cabinets stayed sealed once they hit the floor; nothing was meant to break.
The base of each station is a solid-core door, a nod to Amazon's Door Desk: the desks built from doors that Jeff Bezos used in the company's early years, and that Amazon has kept around since as a frugality symbol. Putting the artwork on top of one felt right for a piece installed across the company's campus.
The mast that carries each screen is a length of 8020 aluminium extrusion bolted to a steel base plate. Cross-members and base plates were drilled and tapped in-house on the Haas Mini Mill that arrived during the Ground Floor Studio build-out and lived on the workshop floor for the rest of the year.
The sensor
The Azure Kinect DK combines a time-of-flight depth sensor and an RGB camera in one small block. On each station it ran a body-tracking pipeline and fed the position of a single viewer to the PC, which used that position to drive the virtual camera inside Blender. Step left, the virtual camera moved left; lean in, it leaned in. Nothing to hold, nothing to click — the picture you saw was always a function of where your body happened to be.
Per-station specification · Build, summer 2023
Chapter 05
The three stations were placed in Amazon office buildings across South Lake Union — between elevator banks, beside coffee bars, in glass-walled lobbies — so that the work would meet people on their way to and from their desks.
Chapter 06
The exhibit was part of Ground Floor Studio, Joshua Borsman's year-long artist residency on Amazon's South Lake Union campus, in partnership with Amazon GREF.
Artist · 2023
Joshua Borsman
Artist · Engineer
Sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit. Founder of Ground Floor Studio. joshuaborsman.com
Production
Special thanks
To Ben Eiben, lead horticulturalist for the Spheres, who opened the doors after hours so the scanning could happen without disturbing the building's daily public life — and to the wider Amazon Horticulture Team who look after the rainforest the rest of the time.
To Colin Jankel, Amazon engineer and fellow tinkerer, who lent the Leica BLK scanner and worked every capture session alongside Joshua. The scan, and so the work, does not exist without him.