At the recent WWDC developer conference, Apple amazed visitors by showing showcasing 20,000 most popular apple apps on a massive hyperwall built up of Cinema Displays — one that pulses in sync with each and every App Store download.

The array, mounted on a wall inside San Francisco’s Moscone Center West, is made up of twenty edge-to-edge 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays, each of which are powered by a Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. One eyewitness says the systems are pooled together in one large, monolithic black box.

Quartz Composer is employed to render the icons rapidly and to automate their behavior. All of the icons are sorted by color and, importantly, aren’t there just for show. While not quite a by-the-second recreation of what’s happening at the App Store — as the results are delayed by five minutes — the “live” mural has each iPhone app’s icon pulse light outwards in a ripple whenever someone downloads that app.

You can see another video here.

Images:

The last image says it all.

images & Videos Courtesy: Apple Insider