15x15x15 LED cube with thermal sensors I'm trying to wrap my head around a public art project that I've recently received funding for, and I'm hoping that someone here can help me with a bit of guidance. 

The concept I'm working on is a kind of 'digital campfire' that builds and falls in intensity as people approach and depart. 

The way I imagine it working is with a 15x15x15 RGB LED cube that plays fire-like animations of varying intensities in response to the presence of nearby people - detected by a 360 degree array of thermal sensors (probably something like Omron D6T sensors, rather than IR movement sensors).

Full disclosure: I'm an Arduino noob. I've tinkered with LEDs and soldering, but even the thought of building a non-responsive 4x4x4 LED cube hurts my brain. That said, I have a couple of months up my sleeve, a bit of cash, and a willingness to forge new neural pathways to get this done. 

My main questions at this point are:


Can an Arduino even handle the processing power required to run a thermal activated 15x15x15 LED cube, even with multiplexing?
I'm considering 15-cubed because I want the object to have a fairly large physical presence, and have a relatively high definition. Is there any game-changing reason I should seriously consider something smaller? I anticipate being able to connect to a 240v power outlet (I'm in Australia), but running off battery would be ideal. 
How difficult would it be to build a 360 degree thermal sensor array consisting of, say, 8 separate thermal sensors? The programming is clearly beyond me, and I expect to out-source this...


Any help or suggestions would be hugely appreciated. And don't be gentle – if my expectations need to be 're-aligned' to something closer to reality, I'd rather that happen sooner than later. 

Cheers, 

Adam
The answer to "Can an Arduino even handle the processing power" is probably No, but no one can really answer because you have not specified the problem.

Just for starters you have >3k LEDS, if you want to control RGB that means ~10k devices.

To operate at moderate brightness (10mA per LED) you will need at least a 35A power supply. This will require external high power circuitry to switch/control.

Do you need to individually control each LED? To control 10k devices you will need serious external circuitry.

Do you need to control brightness or just switch individual devices on/off?

You could probably achieve a solution, but 15 modules each controlling 15*15 LEDS may be achievable, 32 or 64 is probably more realistic.

Either way soldering by hand would be impractical, you need to design a board for each module.

You could use an Arduino on each module, but a ATMega chip would achieve the same end, without the unnecessary peripheral circuitry.