If you’ve been watching the wire lately, you would have noticed a large spike in OLED production, news, and marketing.  From backlights to specialized architectural illumination, OLEDs are trying hard to find their way into the commercial market.  Analysts project that over the next ten years or so, we’ll see a very large spike in their usage and production, especially in the backlighting market.  The chart below shows some of those projected numbers:

According to a report published by NanoMarkets, OLED Lighting Markets 2008, OLED lighting markets will grow from approximately $2.8 million this year to around $6 billion in 2015.  That’s a pretty enormous jump - I hope that the market can live up to the standard to which it’s about to be held.

The second cousin of OLED, the ILED (inorganic LED) is based on a semiconductor design, whereas the OLED is attached to a sheet-type substrate.  ILEDs are most like spotlights, and OLEDs are more like washlights in that respect - manufacturing OLEDs in large format is a major engineering and manufacturing challenege to which an answer is being sought in order to get OLEDs further into the market.  ILEDs are burning the trail into the market for OLEDs, and as soon as certain issues are addressed, we’ll see OLEDs in a more standard capacity for solid state lighting.

An interesting future prediction is what’s going to happen to non-LED sources once OLEDs and ILEDs hit the market in full strength.  From the article at LEDs Magazine:

Most development activity is being targeted at the 1000-nit brightness level, generally considered to be the entry point for general-purpose lighting (an attractive opportunity for OLED lighting simply because the addressable market is so large). About 24 billion light bulbs for general illumination are sold worldwide every year.

But while the demand for lighting will increase as development proceeds in Asia, Africa and Latin America, it also seems likely that fewer bulbs, tubes and lighting arrays will be bought, simply because these lighting products are achieving longer lifetimes. As a result, NanoMarkets expects the addressable market to fall to about 10 billion units by the end of the forecast period. This represents OLED lighting sales for the general-purpose lighting market of about $1.1 m in 2008, growing to almost $2.3 bn in 2015.

I’m very interested in how this technology is going to continue to impact the industry and more specifically, design within the industry.  If you have insight on this subject as it matures, please post in the comments or contact me.

All lighting and audio people know about the hilarious rivalry we have between us, but this just sucks so much that people need to know about it.  Glenn Hatch’s tour truck, loaded with audio, was stolen in Placentia, CA.  Obviously, if you have seen it, please contact him.

Good luck, Glenn.

AUDIO WEST owner Glenn Hatch reported this morning that his 26′ FREIGHTLINER white tour truck with a gray cab, license plate no. GU91747 was stolen from his parking lot in Placentia, California on Saturday 12/13, 2008.

Contents of this Audio West truck, contained the items below:
Midas XL8
Yamaha PM1D
6 channels of 3K/5K receivers
8 SKM5000 with KK105 capsules
20 KM184/185
Multiple d+b audioteknik speaker enclosures
Multiple ATA cases - black, filled with equipment

Please broadcast this information so that we can help one of our best friends in this industry. You may contact Glenn Hatch if you hear/see anything.
Glenn Hatch
Audio West
Owner/Engineer
670 S. Jefferson Street, Unit G
Placentia, CA 92870-6638
USA
glenhatch@aol.com
Office phone: 714.528.2285
Office fax: 714.528.9070
Cell phone: 714.920.7520
Pager: SKYPE: in-sanity42

A while ago, I wrote about a product called SpectraWOW+ - it’s an LED source, very small, with a very big output.  I was fortunate enough to run into the LDDE booth at LDI this year, and met Greg Fuller, the guy responsible for the USA getting to know the products.  SpectraWOW isn’t the only awesome thing that Greg’s team is working on, I guarantee.

Check out some images of LDI and European Dynamic Lighting, LLC from 2008:

SpectraWOW is just such a great product - low heat energy (well, really nearly no heat exchanged, it’s such a cool product to the touch), and the little rig that Greg had at LDI, which was basically a stand of 4 (from what I remember) with power and signal built in.  Very neat.  I am hoping to hear back from Greg about the lens that SpectraWOW uses to rid the fixture of multicolored shadows, and I will post an article dedicated to that lens, as it is spectacular.

European Dynamic Lighting also has a product - a color changing, fluorescent-esque LED product with a zero flicker on dim feature that Greg was telling me just got ordered for an opera in Europe - on demanded request from the designer working the show.  I hope to get more info on that ASAP.  I *think* it was Patrick Woodroofe, I *think* the product was the CYCLED 9, and I am pretty sure Patrick ordered about 400+ of the units for a show in Vienna.  Cool.  From what I understand from Greg, Cirque is testing some of his products as well.

Live Design has a good article about how the President Elect’s acceptance speech was lit.  Check it out.

In case you’re a big nerd like me, here’s the gear list from the televised speech:

72 Martin MAC 2000 Wash XB™
2 grandMA 2048 Ch. Console
6 SyncroLite XLs
2 Musco Type “C” Trucks
72 Altman Focusing CYC
29 2-foot Ministrips
3 Jem ZR33 Hi-Mass™
3 DF-50 Hazer
3 Versa Fan
3 M2 2.5k Lycian Spots
4 Lycian 1293 3k Xenon Followspot

I found a bit better video of CNN’s holographic projections of Jessica Yellin during election night.  I keep wondering where Mr. Scott is to finish beaming her up.

The crew for the band Feeder escaped death a few weeks ago when their tourbus caught on fire traveling between cities in the UK.  From the article on the Feeder website:

The crew of Feeder’s current UK tour escaped unharmed this weekend when their bus caught fire on the M62 while travelling between Glasgow and Lincoln. The band who had played a sold out show at Glasgow Barrowlands the previous evening were travelling in a separate vehicle.

At 5:30am on Saturday 25th October the driver of the crew bus saw flames and smoke coming from the back of the tour bus. The driver immediately pulled onto the hard shoulder and woke the 13 sleeping crew members to evacuate them.

Minutes after everyone was safely away from the vehicle, the fire took hold and the bus was completely destroyed. As well as tour equipment and merchandise, the 13 men and women on board lost their personal belongings. JD Sports in Lincoln kindly dressed the crew the following day!

So, I’ve embedded a video below of CNN’s Holograms that I posted earlier this week.  They looked okay, but as the technology improves, I know they will look better.  Check out the video - the holograms are towards the end.

I have done my very, very, very best to stay far far away from Election news on JimOnLight.  I could not pass this news story up.  Don’t worry, it’s not about Obama or McCain - instead, it’s about CNN’s news anchors.

They will be interviewing holograms on live television.  It’s a technology that isn’t far off from full-time use (obviously), and if it works right, I bet we’ll be seeing a heckofa lot more of it on CNN and other news agencies.  From the USAToday article:

There are plenty of reasons for the gimmicks: This year’s race has been intensely followed, and is expected to draw tens of millions of voters — and viewers — on Nov. 4. Significantly more people are expected to watch Tuesday night’s results than in 2004, when about 64 million viewed election-night results on network and cable TV, according to Nielsen.

USA TODAY got an exclusive peek at the holographic technology, which CNN hopes to unveil prior to the election on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. CNN is still fine-tuning the technology.

“It’s so complicated,” Bohrman says. “The crew is basically shooting someone that isn’t there.”

CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There’ll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.

This technology is amazing stuff - used on a small scale already, and in a large scale in some theatres, especially in Canada.  Expect to see an article about it soon.

The Utah Jazz just added 120 new moving lights and a bunch of loud wedges to their arena to “jazz up” (sorry!) their home games.  From the article at Salt Lake Tribune:

The introductions will start with AC/DC’s “Hells Bells,” move on to a highlight video and end
with the starting five taking the court to the same Alan Parsons Project song as Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, “Sirius.”

Here’s a link to the video of their new opening hullabaloo.  Does anyone know what type of fixtures they decided to install?

Imagine a world in which a device existed that could coordinate all worlds of production (INCLUDING AUDIO), not control mind you, but coordinate - communication between gear and systems, systems helping out systems, and systems watching out for other systems to help systems do their respective jobs.

Now imagine a world where a device like this is in R+D, and a working model already exists.

Cast is developing Black Box - a project between several companies that is going to revolutionize our industry and our markets.  I’ve talked with Gil Densham a few times now, and I finally had a chance at LDI to see the Black Box in action.  Cast is shooting for a fully capable production model in September of 2009 (don’t hold me or Cast to that date, as the universe is the universe).  There are several companies that are teaming up to get this thing a kickin’, and everything depends on the coordinated efforts.  Patience, young camper, patience.

Gil explained Black Box to me with a very simple couple of scenarios - let me list one now.  Scenario 1, a moving screen.  Imagine a projection screen on a motor system that moves the projector around the stage, and a director who wants that screen to do different stuff every night.  There is an image being projected on that screen, and as the screen movess, the image needs to be constantly updated with reference to keystoning.  That image on the screen might also come in contact with some moving lights as it moves.  What happens when all of this stuff happens?  Anyone who’s programmed a DL-1 or DL-2 knows that this would be some pretty incredible progrtamming to do this live every night - how do you correct all of the keystoning on the fly?  How do you douse the moving lights that cross the screen’s path?  This is where the Black Box concept comes in.

From Cast’s press release about the Black Box concept:

BlackBox is built with special hardware and proprietary software to be an all-in-one, bi-directional high-speed communications nerve centre which enables all control devices to instruct or receive instructions from each other. Live, realtime input in all forms is received by the BlackBox, which acts as the brains - running an ultra high-speed hybrid version of wysiwyg that works with a special new wysiwyg file version (that CAST is working on now). BlackBox receives and converts live positional data about any or many moving objects, selected or deselected for tracking as required from one or several sources, applies its brain power and speed to establish the exact 3D positions of those objects, then computes instructions in XYZ, yar, pitch and roll terms, and then shoots out moving positional information to whatever control devices need it. So moving lights, set pieces, cameras etc. are synchronized and tracking the action of those moving objects - all in live realtime, all in true 3D.

These are exciting times, kids.  Exciting times.  More on Black Box to come.