Overview
For the stablecoin area of the Stripe Sessions conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, we designed and built the generative visuals for a 2-meter LED sphere that visualized global stablecoin activity in real time. The sphere displayed live transaction data, and each time an attendee bought a coffee with stablecoin, the purchase set off its own animation across the surface.
The Challenge
Stripe wanted something more immersive than a standard screen, an installation that would draw a crowd and make the fluid, global nature of digital currency feel intuitive. The visuals had to wrap seamlessly around a spherical surface, react to live data within milliseconds, and hold up from every viewing angle, all within a seven-week timeline and with limited access to the physical hardware.
Our Role
Working alongside lead creative technologist Wesley Grubbs and data visualization developer Kristin Baumann, Seven Mile Media led the design and development of the sphere’s generative visual language. We created the looping waveforms, data-reactive animations, and custom spherical projections, then worked on-site with the LED technicians to tune the visuals for the sphere’s geometry and lighting.
Technical Implementation
Three.js: We built a UV-mapped virtual sphere to prototype animations and catch distortion without needing the physical hardware.
P5.js: We used noise loops, sine wave functions, and grid-based patterns that tile cleanly in every direction, so the visuals wrap the sphere with no visible seam.
Data-Reactive Animation: We connected our visuals to a real-time pipeline so that live stablecoin metrics and coffee purchases triggered unique effects on the sphere.
Visual Direction: We expanded on the geometric animations of Stripe’s own 404 page into a full visual language of flowing patterns in Stripe’s brand palette.
On-Site Calibration: We worked with the LED team at the Moscone Center to optimize motion speed, brightness, and alignment on the physical installation.
The sphere became a centerpiece of the Expo floor, turning abstract financial data into a living, captivating visualization and showing what’s possible when creative code moves off the screen and into physical space.