A Different Perspective

>>If Curt Winter has his way, the streets of New York will be crawling with animals creeping out of the grates next year. But we’re not talking about rats and roaches; these friendly critters will appear from nowhere and stop people to chat.

At least, that’s Winter’s plan. The 30-year-old Naples newcomer is providing the technology, which involves projecting images on screens of fine mist, for this surreal-sounding promotion for a Disney movie.

Winter, president of Lucid LLC, recently moved his business from Chicago to Naples, where he plans to make high-tech audio/visual gizmos that he creates for big commercial marketing events available to affluent homeowners. He’ll take technology that clients such as Old Navy, Saks Fifth Avenue and Motorola use for in-store displays and marketing shows and apply it to systems built specifically for homeowners—such as turning a window into a TV.

His work seems mysterious—not just because of a high level of client confidentiality (a number of them weren’t available for comment), but also because most of us have seen the kinds of effects he produces only in movies.

For instance, at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York, he provided technology for a Ralph Lauren marketing initiative a few years ago, whereby a group of people walking along the street would suddenly pass themselves—in Lauren clothes. "We’d take video and then convert it so it looks like they’re walking past themselves, but then we put them in different clothes to fit the brand," Winter explains.

"Curt’s a great engineer," says Mandeep Bhatia, who worked with him on that and other projects. A partner in Boston-based Alt Terrain, which collaborates with ad agencies on signature marketing initiatives, Bhatia recently launched New York-based Admospheric, intending to take those concepts a step further—partly with Winter’s technology.