London 2012 Fireworks–Amazing Sync! London’s spectacular midnight fireworks display, welcoming in 2012. Happy New Year! This is really BRILLIANT. Best camera settings and really cool firework. This makes other large fireworks look mediocre!
Thank you Control Geek blog for telling about this.
John Huntington’s Blog has covered a lot of holiday light displays over the years. Brooklyn’s Holiday Light Spectacular is the newest one covered on the blog. It tells about Holiday Light Spectacular display with nice pictures, and also gives details on technology behind the display.
If you want to do your own holiday light display then here are some links to interesting project ideas from around Internet: Control your holiday lights with a magic wand circuit allows you to turn on your holiday bulbs with a wave of the magic wand. DIY Christmas Light Suit project uses LabVIEW to perform sound analysis of a playing music and uses LabVIEW Interface for Arduino (LIFA) to drive various Christmas light strings based on the power level at various frequency ranges. Smart Christmas Tree Lights with JenNet-IP video plays with the idea that “What if every Christmas tree light had an Internet address?”. Don’t forget my older Christmas Lights blog postings.
Light shows are nice to watch, but the technology used in them be can dangerous. Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus’ Retina Damaged by a Show Laser posting tells about the potential dangers of light displays that involve powerful lasers. In video Mark Hoppus Presents: The World’s Most Powerful Touring Laser Blink-182’s bassist and singer Mark Hoppus talks about how he suffered retinal damage during a show in Milwaukee. In the video, he does a pretty good job of explaining how the laser show process works in terms of protecting the audience and what went wrong in performance. That show used a very powerful 26W Lightwave Lightwave Prism Series laser show equipment (you have read right, that’s watts, NOT milliwatts you normally see in most laser specifications).
Remember that this kind of laser damage to eye is usually permanent. Primary personal hazards of high-power laser exposure are skin burns, blind spots when the laser strikes the retina, and the worst case total blindness. Lasers have been coming back into vogue in recent years on touring concerts, so be careful if you happen to be near them or operate them. Remember Laser Safety. There is also a a growing concern over the increased potential risk of eye damage from high power LEDs as well because intense blue light can cause damage to the retina. Do not stare at lasers or very high brightness LEDs, because doing so may cause permanent damage to your eyes. Remember that lasers can also damage cameras and camcorders, and even video projector chips (DLP).
What do you get when you take Angry Birds and Christmas lights? 25,000 Angry Christmas Lights video shows that you get 25,000 Christmas lights pumping to the Angry Bird Theme song covered by Pomplamoose.
The video description tells that the lights don’t actually go on until after Thanksgiving. This video is shot at a middle of the night test run according to the video description. More information on this light show can be found at http://www.listentoourlights.com/
Friday special: Groovy Video Coat video I found on Internet:
More details on electronics can be found on Groovy Video Coat pictures and this Video Coat Prototype video:
LEDs are used for a long time for all kinds of data communications applications ranging from wireless IR remote controls and IrDA to wired fiber optics communication. There has been many years ago also ideas on optical wireless LANs based on infrared, but they faded quickly. But now when LED lights are becoming very popular this idea could see a second coming.
Ceiling lights in Minn. send coded Internet data article tells about LED lights that will transmit data to specially equipped computers on desks below by flickering faster than the eye can see. The first few light fixtures built by LVX System will be installed in six municipal buildings in the central Minnesota. The LVX system puts clusters of its light-emitting diodes in a standard-sized light fixture. The LEDs transmit coded messages A light on the modem talks back to the fixture overhead, where there is sensor to receive the return signal and transmit the data over the Internet. It works in almost exactly the same way that fiber optic systems do, except the sender and receiver aren’t connected by a cable. Communicating lights are set up using just ordinary power connections. The first generation of the LVX system will transmit data at speeds of about 3 megabits per second. If you are interested check video from Get ElectricTV.
There is another application that also combines wireless communications and LED lights. Finnish article Wlan ohjaa yksittäisiä led-loisteputkia (read English translation) tells about LED light tubes can be controlled by a WLAN connection, even individually. Finnish company Valtavalo has licensed Netled control technology from Yashima Dengyo Co., Ltd. and sells their products. Netled technology is designed to provide means to monitor in electricity consumption in real time and control the various LED light tube groups.
The first law of musical robotics: rock hard. Rock Robots: PAM Can Seriously Shred, Open Source MARIE Could Do Even More article shows you some interesting videos on robotic musical experiments. Here is one of them.
Lego Holiday Ornament page shows how to build a set of fun holiday items with Lego. The first object you will tackle is an ornament for your tree. The project web page contains model file for free Lego Digital Designer 4.0 software.
Geek Christmas Ornaments: Part 9 web page shows how to make keyboard circuitry sheet Christmas ornaments. Just take apart an old keyboard, remove the flexible circuit-board sheet from under the keys and cut them to right size pieces to make interesting looking ornaments.
LEDs can be used to make all kinds of high-tech decorations for the holidays. Make a hackable LED ornament web page shows how to make an LED ornament that lets you shuffle different colours and types of LEDs at any time depending on what you want. How to make high-tech LED decorations for the holidays web page present two open-source, do-it-yourself, microcontroller-powered holiday electronics projects: A micro-readerboard Christmas tree ornament and a mini-LED Hanukkah menorah. DIY holiday ornaments web page gives you some more links to similar projects.
My Christmas Lights display and controlling them discussion board posting from few years back will give you links to nice and otherwise interesting Christmas Lights displays. You can find lots of light controlling ideas from discussion board Home Automation section. Feel free to post there more links and ideas. Happy holidays.
Sometimes when browsing web I stumble onto huge trends that I’ve never even heard of before. Japanese virtual pop diva Hatsune Miku is one such thing. Hatsune Miku is a virtual singing avatar that you can purchase for your PC and program to play any song you create. That’s nothing very special nowadays. But what is interesting. But this virtual avatar have gone on limited tours in Japan and virtual avatar song writing is a growing trend all over the world. The 3D ‘hologram’ projection doesn’t look that impressive to me, but the crowd seems to be enjoying seeing it very much.That is incredible! There’s a robot pop singer and now a hologram pop singer, what is next?
John’s Entertainment Technology Blog has an interesting series of postings related infra-sound (sounds lower in frequency you can hear):
Gravesend Inn-frasound: Subsonic Show Business article says that 19Hz standing air wave may under certain conditions create sensory phenomena suggestive of a ghost.
Gravesend Inn-frasound: The Experiment tells about a psychological experiment made on the effects of infra-sounds.
Gravesend Inn-frasound: Creating and Measuring Infrasound tells the technology challenges met in creating the needed 19 Hz infra-sound. The article tells why the idea of playing infrasound out of the computer failed and why they went to the idea of using an external function generator.
Gravesend Inn-frasound Experiment: Using Show Control Technologies in Psychological Research article tells details of the show control system used to run the experiment.
Gravesend Inn-frasound: Science! article tells if there was statistically signficant difference in response between the group that was exposed to infrasound and the group that was not.
The Wilderness Downtown is an interactive film by Chris Milk. This masterpiece music video film is built using HTML5 technologies (unfortunately at the moment works only with Google Chrome browser). The music video tooks the user back to their childhood on an interactive journey set to the backdrop of We Used to Wait by the Arcade Fire. The Wilderness Downtown can our eyes to the interactive possibilities of the Internet. This presentation uses choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering and using images/video from Google street view as part of the presentation. Is this the future of the music videos?
