Portals are large-scale, always-on video installations placed in public spaces, town squares, waterfronts, cultural landmarks that create a permanent live visual connection between cities, countries, and communities. Unlike corporate video tools designed for meetings and workflows, Portals exist purely for human encounter: to let strangers on opposite sides of the world see each other, wave, dance, hold up signs, and share a moment in real time. They connect people using the only universal language known to all of humanity, body language, deliberately offering a purely visual livestream on the basis that adding more features takes away from the essential experience. The idea is not a technology product but a civic one: that proximity, even simulated, changes how people feel about each other.
Video Window’s technology powers the Portals project, due to Video Window’s always-on Video feature, keeping the Portals connected 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The Portals across the world connect through a 24/7 rotating livestream, seeking to provide equal screen time to all locations whether they are large cities or small towns, with each Portal built as a technology sculpture designed to last for centuries.
Conceived in 2016, the first Portals debuted in Vilnius, Lithuania and Lublin, Poland in 2021, impacting millions of people worldwide, before the Portals Organization was incorporated to expand the network to all countries on Earth. Since then the project has grown steadily: installations have appeared in New York City’s Flatiron Plaza, Dublin’s O’Connell Street, Philadelphia’s Love Park, and Ipswich in the UK, with Asia’s first Portal announced for Bonifacio Global City in Manila in January 2026. Each sculpture serves as a reminder that people share more than what separates them, an invitation to experience the world as one united home planet.