HALF GREY BEAR
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Interactive technology & fabrication studio

We build the impossible brief.

Playable phones the size of a person. Trees that breathe colour. Tunnels of infinite light. We engineer the lighting, LED, sensors and bespoke electronics behind it all — and bridge the kit that was never meant to talk.

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01 /The studio

If the kit to pull it off doesn't exist, we design it, build it and program it — in‑house.

Every good brief hides a thing nobody sells: a button that has to survive the public, six universes of pixels locked to timecode, a decades-old protocol that has to talk to a modern web app. That's our bit. We design the boards, write the firmware, map the light, and cut, weld and finish the build — and we've been doing it on live shows for the better part of thirty years.

  • 25+years making live events
  • 100%designed & built in-house
  • UKmade in Britain, runs worldwide

02 /Selected work

Things we were told couldn't be built.

A mirrored, pixel-mapped neon tunnel forming an infinite kaleidoscopic corridor of coloured light.
Pixel-mapped installation

The Infinity Cave

An endless mirrored corridor of colour — hundreds of metres of addressable LED, mapped and sequenced pixel by pixel, in-house.

A giant red retro mobile phone with a backlit keypad and a colour screen running a playable game of Snake (Viper), on an exhibition stand at Mobile World Congress.
Playable build

Snake (Viper), Supersized

A phone the size of a person, running fully playable Snake (Viper) — scan your pass, take the keypad, play. Backlit keys, LED antenna and custom electronics throughout. Built for Mobile World Congress.

A sculptural, faceted tree wrapped in colour-shifting RGB light under an illuminated arch, glowing in a darkened venue.
Light sculpture · Paris

The Light Tree

A sculptural tree wrapped in colour — bespoke LED, mapping and effects that make it breathe, shift and bloom on cue.

A custom black circuit board labelled PixelWrangler 2, © HALF GREY BEAR Ltd 2025, with an ESP32 module, Ethernet jack, screw terminals and DC power input.
In-house hardware

We design the boards

Most of our builds start as a blank PCB. Ethernet in one end, the whole show out the other — our own controllers and nodes, drawn, assembled and programmed by us, so nothing limits what we can connect.

Two LED neon beer-pong tables side by side, cup racks glowing red and blue, rainbow pixel-tape edges.
AI image → real build

Neon Beer Pong

The brief was one AI-generated picture. We built it for real — two LED tables, a jackpot green cup and a game you could play sober. Now living in the client CEO's games room.

Light Motion Interaction Control Bespoke

03 /What we do

One studio, the whole build.

From sketch to show floor: we design the boards, map the light, write the code, and cut, weld and finish the build — one team, no hand-offs, nothing lost between them.

  • 01

    Bespoke controllers & custom electronics

    Our own PCBs, controllers and nodes — schematic to soldered, programmed and show-proven. If the thing you need doesn't exist, we draw it.

  • 02

    LED & lighting control

    Art-Net, sACN and DMX at any scale — from a single fixture to tens of thousands of mapped pixels, every frame in sync.

  • 03

    Sensors, buttons & interaction

    Arcade buttons, joysticks, RFID, motion and touch — inputs built for the public and engineered to take a hammering all day.

  • 04

    Bridging, show control & networking

    The missing piece between systems that were never meant to talk — protocols translated, timing locked, triggering rock-solid: one show instead of five arguing boxes, flawless on show two hundred as on opening night.

  • 05

    Software & simulation

    Control apps, digital twins and simulators to design, test and drive the build — so it works long before it's powered on for real.

  • 06

    Fabrication & finish

    CNC, carpentry, welding and laser cutting — sets, housings and structures built to look the part and survive the tour.

04 /Embedded, not bolted on

Some of our best work has someone else's name on it.

We embed in agency and production teams — weeks or months at a time, on the client calls, in the room when it's pitched — and build the interactive layer under your banner: the electronics, the software, the show control, the parts everyone else calls impossible. You keep the relationship; we make the technology disappear into the work. And your client's wildest idea quietly gets a delivery date.

One cohesive product, two teams, no seams.

See how it works — Vodafone at MWC →

05 /Apps & tools

We ship our tools, too.

The software and firmware we build for our own shows — a stage timer, a test-pattern generator, controller firmware — with proper support and downloads.

06 /Let's build something

Bring us the idea everyone else said no to.

A napkin sketch is plenty. We'll engineer the rest — from “can we?” to “standby… go.”

@halfgreybear ↗