Luminos from Tomoaki Yanagisawa sounds like it should be some kind of crazy cereal that either lights up when milk hits it, or maybe it makes your stomach glow once it’s eaten.  Instead, it’s a series of building blocks that light up in the darkness, and they’re quite cool.

From Tomoaki’s portfolio page:

Luminos are bricks in darkness. Like a candle needs a fire to light it up, Luminos, which have light sensors and LEDs, need light to turn the LEDs on.  This is a simple and intuitive interaction yet it has the possibility of complexity of a chain reaction created by configurations of Luminos like dominoes and bricks.

Barco, Electrabel, and Magic Monkey put on a display that just closed yesterday - a magical display of LED wonderment and architectural beauty.  Check out the press release from Barco:

Barco, a global leader in LED technology, is proud to announce that its creative LED MiSTRIP has been chosen for the Electrabel Nights in Brussels. From 28 November to 28 December 2008, the Grand Place is the setting for a spectacular sound and light spectacle designed and produced by Magic Monkey and showing Barco’s MiSTRIP at its best.

Every year in December, the city of Brussels organizes Winter Wonders, a special Christmas event that entices about three million visitors who come and enjoy the extensive cultural program and the Christmas market. For this special occasion, Electrabel, Belgium’s main energy producer and distributor, organizes the Electrabel Nights on the Grand Place.

This year’s design transforms the Grand Place into a magical forest, complete with mythical animal sounds. Groups of MiSTRIP masts are scattered all around the twenty meter high Christmas tree, giving the audience the chance to walk around as if they are actually in the forest. The masts can be seen from every corner of the Grand Place fully integrating the public in a 3D performance.

To complete this experience, each mast is also equipped with 2 speakers. The soundtrack, specially composed for this occasion, plays simultaneously with the MiSTRIP video, turning the show into a sensorial experience for everyone passing by. “This show is a new cutting edge step in the architectural lighting by integrating the actual environment and including the public into the show”, says Marc Largent from Magic Monkey. “Even though the centre of Brussels is extremely busy during the Christmas period, the Grand Place offers a heaven of tranquility for the visitors to relax while watching this modern fairy tale.”

“Barco’s MiSTRIP allows us to push our designs as far as possible,” concludes Marc Largent. “Their flexibility creates unlimited possibilities, and we designers are very lucky to have creative LED tools like the MiSTRIP available on the market today.”

The evening program starts at 16h30, but thanks to the high brightness of the MiSTRIP, an ambient version of the show can also be seen during the day on the Grand Place.

The MiSTRIP product page is here.  Also, check out Magic Monkey’s site- they design a lot of really beautiful stuff.

This one’s for my best friend Greggie.  Merry Christmas, brother.

…and Merry Christmas to you, Hack-N-Mod!

60,000 LEGOs, Hack-N-Mod sleek blue LEDs, and a whole bunch of free time, one LEGO Star Wars fan built this diorama - complete with At-Ats, storm troopers and all of the incredible details.  This project was four years and three thousand dollars in the making.

What you’re looking at above is an LED installation in Paris that interacts with human “signal” - mobile phone signals, people walking and cars driving, and interprets these datum into motion and light.  The article from LEDs Mag talk about the installation, “fLUX.”  From the article:

The installation was located on the banks of the Saint-Denis canal in the area of the Saint-Denis train station (a northern region of Paris), used by an average 60,000 commuters each day.

The installation consists of a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed every 3 meters to form a kinetic wall. The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white. Their rotation is controlled by microprocessors, allowing to determine precisely the rotation speed and angle, while their networking allows to synchronise the movement of the 32 panels.

There were two companies that worked to design and give life to fLUX -A Belgian artist collective called LAb[au] and produced by a French art organization Synesthesie.  Have you seen this installation?  Got any pictures?  Post in the comments!

Check out the video below - more lighting related Christmas Tree video fun!

TreeWax from klipcollective on Vimeo.

We’re talking about a light the guy designed.  If I were being dirty, I’d be writing about Stefano Pistilli’s “Mahoo-hoo.”  But alas, I am not.

Stefano Pistilli has designed a swizzle stick type mini fixture that uses water (or hopefully liquid of any sort) to close the circuit and light the lamp.  I found Stefano’s website through Yanko Design, but there are very few images and links that aren’t PDF embedded on his site.  If you do feel like looking at Stefano’s work via his PDF portfolio, I highly recommend it.  It’s here (FYI, this is a link to a PDF).

Do you think this would light up my Woodford Reserve bourbon?

Have you seen the NYE ball for this year?  It’s a massive LED Ball of Awesomeness!

LEDs Mag has an article about the big LED star that will help us bring in the new year - 2009 will at least start with some idea of brilliance as that ball hits the contacts at the bottom, signalling the end of 2008.  The picture’s caption, from LEDs Mag’s post about it, says that the New Years’ Eve Ball is “powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDS,” and that “the new Ball is capable of creating a palette of more than 16 million vibrant colors and billions of patterns.”

Awesome.  Do you think it will make it less cold and miserable to stand in Times Square waiting for that thing to fall?

Apparently this new ball is an extensive product of multiple tests and experimentation.  From the article:

Lighting Science Group, which designed, developed, and produced an integrated lighting system for this year’s and last year’s ball, tackled the weather obstacle. Extensive electrical, mechanical, thermal, and environmental tests were performed on the system’s 672 LED modules, power systems, and power and data distribution networks to assure long-term performance through all kinds of weather.

“We had a proven LED module design [from last year’s ball] that we were able to modify in the time frame for the increased weatherproof-ness because it’s becoming a permanent installation. It had to be ready for whatever the New York environment could throw at it,” said John Burne, special projects lighting manager with LSG.

An integrated thermal management system was installed to, among other things, help cool the ball during the baking heat of the NY summer. Every LED board has substantial heat sinking on the rear with active thermal management. Thermal sensors inside the bulb that communicate back to the media server can dim the bulb as temperatures rise. Blowers inside the bulb can also evacuate the hot air, if necessary.

I’m looking forward to seeing it!

I love the little USB toys for those of us who need shiny things to help kill our attention span.  It’s a USB Christmas Tree!

I have a USB Lava Lamp that ESP VIsion was giving out at LDI 2006.  Those things were awesome.

Flickr has a great feature for collecting images for a certain place within Flickr’s user base.  This place section has more images for more parts of the world than is possibly time to look at them all.  One of the sets that struck me as the most remarkable was the collection of photos from Amsterdam in the Netherlands.  All of the channels, lit softly with multiple colors, and the streetlights - the images are just stunning.

Check out the Amsterdam Places page in Flickr.

Make Mag has a purchasable kit for the HexPummer LED lantern - which is solar powered!  The little LEDs inside “pumm” when the levels of light go down, draining the batteries in the little device of the day’s rays.

These things are cool!  You know me and the nerdy stuff!

Have you ever checked out the “Maker’s Shed” at Make Magazine?  Do you like to put stuff together and build circuits?  Check out the Maker’s Shed.