Before HYPERVSN made trainers, dragons and human greeters hover in mid-air, it put advertising on a bicycle. Kiryl Chykeyuk, an Oxford engineering doctorate, and his childhood friend Art Stavenka built an LED system that played video across a moving wheel. The contraption won awards and, in 2012, an investment offer on the British television show Dragons' Den. Then the founders did something more useful than winning: they declined the deal.
A year later, a prototype spun those lights into the appearance of an image hanging loose in the room. The bicycle receded. The illusion stayed. Chykeyuk later said the team immediately understood the second idea's magnitude and concentrated its effort there. It is the cleanest explanation of HYPERVSN's business: find the part of a prototype that makes strangers stop, then build an industrial system around it.
Engineer, CEO, professional screen vanisher.
Founder, keeper of the human experience.
Founder, from bicycle pitch to brand theatre.
The honest trickNot a hologram. Still a neat piece of engineering.
The machine looks like a four-bladed propeller with rows of LEDs along each arm. As it spins, precisely timed lights draw successive slices of an image. The eye blends them into a coherent picture through persistence of vision. Put animated content on black, and the hardware seems to disappear. A bright shoe or bottle is left floating in the negative space.
“Technically it's not a hologram.”Kiryl Chykeyuk, explaining the technology in 2018
That admission improves the story. True optical holography records and reconstructs a light field, generally using laser light. HYPERVSN makes a display behave like an absent screen. Viewers do not need glasses or a phone, and the LEDs remain punchy under indoor retail lighting. They do need to keep clear of rapidly moving blades, and installers may add enclosures where fingers, crowds or children make that prudent.
How the rectangle vanishes
A Solo is one circular display. A Wall synchronizes many overlapping units so one asset crosses them as a much larger picture. HDMI, live streaming and gesture sensors let the newer SmartV line accept real-time inputs. Around the rotors sits the less photogenic but more defensible machinery: control boxes, mounting systems, a cloud content-management suite, a 3D library, scheduling, device monitoring, creative services and an SDK.
From object to interfaceThe shoe learned to answer back
The product catalogue now reads like a tour of every place a marketer might put a floating noun. SmartV Solo handles a product or logo. Wall goes large. Holographic Human plays a life-size recorded person. Lift & Learn changes the visual when a shopper handles a physical item. The 3D Modeller lets a visitor rotate or customize a model by gesture. Slots turns the display into a lead-capture game. One Shure activation credited the holographic slot machine with 90 percent of leads collected at TwitchCon.
Digital Avatar is the more consequential extension. It connects speech recognition, a chatbot, text-to-speech and animation to a displayed person. The result can greet, explain, translate or answer routine questions in a shop, airport, university or hospital. It turns an attention device into a service interface. Whether visitors want an endlessly cheerful spectral concierge is another question, but the move broadens the budget HYPERVSN can pursue from campaign novelty to operations.
The customer is buying a pauseWhy Nike and airports use the same machine
HYPERVSN's buyers include brands, retailers, event producers, AV integrators, museums, transport hubs, hotels, schools and healthcare providers. The use cases differ, but the problem is consistent: ordinary flat screens have become visual wallpaper. A Nike shoe apparently suspended in a Paris shop, a HUGO influencer changing outfits with a wave, or a security instruction floating at Keflavík Airport interrupts practiced inattention.
The HUGO window is a compact example of what the platform can do when all its layers cooperate. Three SmartV units formed a human-scale image of influencer Jean Carlo León. A gesture camera let passersby swipe through his outfits without touching the glass. The content could be changed remotely through the CMS, while a companion film of León meeting his digital twin carried the installation back onto social media. Hardware produced the roadside pause; interaction stretched it; content distribution gave the stunt a second audience.
At the opposite end of the scale sits the atrium of Sphere Las Vegas. HYPERVSN synchronized a 9-by-15-metre array, its largest project at the time, in a building already stuffed with visual curiosities. The installation made the modular argument in public: a rotor small enough to ship can become an architectural display when control, calibration and content line up. Between those poles are the sensible jobs - a floating engine in an auto showroom, a museum object freed from its case, a multilingual greeter in an airport and a product launch that needs its own camera magnet.
That first number explains why exhibitions became HYPERVSN's laboratory. Its tiny CES 2016 booth generated queues and more than 7,000 inquiries from 97 countries, according to the Consumer Technology Association. Mark Cuban had encountered the company at CES and became an investor. The event did four jobs at once: demonstration, market research, channel recruitment and fundraising. A machine that has to be seen benefits enormously from a place where the curious arrive pre-assembled.
For global delivery, the company partnered with Flex in Cork. Flex handled design for manufacturing, testing, certification, sourcing, warehousing and distribution. An early case study says the collaboration reached roughly 500 units of weekly process capacity and passed 10,000 shipped units. That unglamorous shift - from a compelling prototype to a certifiable product - is where a spectacle becomes a company.
What it costsThe illusion comes with a business case
HYPERVSN does not publish one universal list price. Current European reseller listings put a SmartV Solo around €4,800 to €6,000 before content, mounting, enclosures or installation. A multi-unit wall begins around €30,000 in one reseller catalogue and rises sharply with size; human-scale and custom builds add controllers, housings, sound and creative work. Rental can make more sense for a three-day launch than buying a machine that sleeps for the next 362.
Public reseller prices, not a company rate card
Hardware only varies by model and configuration. Content, control equipment, installation and support can materially change a project quote.
The model mixes hardware and accessories with cloud software, content creation, installation and support. Partners and AV integrators extend sales and deployment. HYPERVSN is also recruiting around premium 3D retail-media networks, where it would secure locations, bring advertiser demand and structure revenue shares. That is a notable change: from selling the unusual screen to operating inventory on it.
The operating conditions are not footnotes. The illusion is strongest when the asset has a black background, the viewing distance is generous and ambient light can be managed. Direct sunlight reduces contrast. Rotors can be audible, particularly in a quiet room, and safety clearances or protective housings complicate a minimalist installation. Cameras can reveal flicker or rolling bands unless their frame rate agrees with the display. A campaign team also needs 3D content composed for the circular canvas; dropping a rectangular television commercial onto it wastes the absence that makes the medium interesting.
This is why a cheaper fan is a real competitor but not an identical purchase. Commodity devices can make a logo spin for a fraction of the money. Conventional LED walls offer proven brightness, familiar workflows and fewer mechanical questions. Transparent OLED retains the rectangle but can show detailed video through glass. Proto encloses a life-size remote person; Looking Glass builds genuine multiview depth for closer inspection. HYPERVSN occupies the loud middle: more theatrical than signage, more deployable than a custom stage illusion and easier to see in a crowd than a headset-bound experience.
Steal this, not the propellerThe repeatable lesson is the system
The easiest part to copy is the wrong part. Cheap “hologram fans” already exist. HYPERVSN's advantage is the integrated route from asset to playback: synchronized hardware, installation knowledge, content designed for the illusion, remote fleet control and a partner network. Proto's enclosed telepresence, Looking Glass's light-field displays, transparent OLED, projection and ordinary LED walls each win under different constraints. HYPERVSN wins when open-air brightness and a visual jolt matter more than photorealistic depth or bargain pricing.
Copy the feedback loop
Put the prototype where buyers gather. Watch what makes them stop. Turn repeated requests - like interactivity - into the next product layer.
Copy the black background
Design for the medium. One isolated object, a short loop and high contrast sell the illusion better than shrinking a conventional video.
Outsource the bottleneck
Flex brought certification, sourcing and logistics. The founders kept product, customers and the peculiar visual language close.
Know the bad room
Low footfall, direct sun, tight margins, audible sensitivity or no appetite for bespoke content can turn wonder into expensive furniture.
The company itself learned the value of timing. During the pandemic, when events and physical retail froze, it emphasized research and customer training instead of chasing unrelated emergency products. SmartV arrived in 2022 with HDMI, live input and more interactivity. Customers had repeatedly asked to touch and alter the visuals; the roadmap followed the request.
HYPERVSN's best work does not ask a viewer to admire display technology. It makes the mechanism vanish behind the thing being sold or explained. That is why the humble bicycle wheel matters. The founders did not merely change products. They noticed that the valuable moment occurred when the wheel disappeared.