Advertising display media name – Zeno
A startup company based in Thailand hired us to name a revolutionary new advertising display media five years in the making that we had to see to believe. So we did, and were blown away, and by the end of the naming project we had crafted the perfect name for such an enigmatic paradox of vision: Zeno. The name also had to have global availability, reach and pronounceability, which we made sure of by running linguistic connotation screens in twenty-four languages.
Zeno of Elea, of course, was the famous Ancient Greek philosopher (circa 495-430 BC) who formulated paradoxes that defended the belief that motion and change are illusory. Notes Wikipedia:
Zeno's paradoxes are a set of paradoxes devised by Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides' doctrine that "all is one" and that contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion. Of the 40 arguments attributed to Zeno by later writers, the four most famous are on the subject of motion: Achilles and the tortoise, the dichotomy paradox, the arrow paradox, and the stadium paradox.
Zeno is a unique new advertising display medium that delivers moving ads to moving people. Still frames from short video clips move optically with the viewer, following and responding individually to each and every viewer, without the use of any electronics or moving parts. Zeno is a uniquely personal interactive experience, coming soon to a public space near you, worldwide.
Advertisers or ad agencies supply Zeno with a short video clip, which Zeno converts to an encoded, 2D poster using their own proprietary software. The poster is inserted into the display, and as viewers walk by, in any direction, their motion animates the video clip.
The "motion", of course, is just an illusion, created in the viewer's mind while moving past the display box and looking through a special glass window through which the encoded ad print is seen. The image above is but a representation of three discreet "frames" of the advertisement, as a still photograph cannot capture the experience of viewing a Zeno advertisement. The motion is illusory. A paradox. A Zeno box.