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!

Make Mag has an article linked from Evil Scientist Labs’ blog featuring edge-lit christmas cards.  These things look pretty simple - some kind of relatively thick poly, an LED, and a battery.  Oh, and some card stock.  You have to check out this article.  Very cool stuff, and pretty easy!  Just don’t slice yourself with the exacto knife!

That title needed extra care taken to its creation…

So check this out - LED candles that respond to human “wind!”  FresHome had a link to ThinkGeek’s store where the candles are sold.  Here’s a video of these things in action - they’re actually pretty awesome!

Check out a blurb about the candles:

The LED Blow On-Off Candles are solid wax (except for some electronics) and feature a natural-looking, flickering light just like normal candles, but they have a couple of extra techno enhanced powers. Regular candles will blow out if you blow on the flame, but these LED candles will also blow on. All you have to do is use the master on/off switch on the bottom, and these candles will turn on and off with just a puff at the “flame”. Even better, each candle has a switch to select either a cool blue flame, or a more realistic yellowish flame. From the proper distance and height, these candles will fool everyone into thinking they are the real thing; they are a fantastic way to put candles where it is too dangerous to have open flames. And, they won’t drip wax all over your mithril armor either.

I love in the video when the guy uses an air cannon to turn them all off.  Lovely.

Designer Young Bok Kim has invented an hourglass type fixture that works to show time via light leaking form the top container to the bottom receptacle.  There are a lot of gimmick-y gadgets out there, but this one is pretty sweet!  You can adjust the time by twisting the unit - and as your time runs out, luminance increases at the bottom and decreases at the top, having replaced the typical sand with LEDs.

Cool.  I want to get one of these!  I don’t know if there is an alarm or anything that sounds once the unit has completely run your time, but I can imagine a slight bit of confusion with when the time is actually out, especially in a lit room.

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Thanks, Yanko Design!

A designer named Sang-Kyun Park has invented an umbrella with LED illumination. It’s called “LightDrops.”

“Well, that’s great,” you might be thinking.

Yeah, true.  It is great.  However, what makes it even greater is the use of a material called “PVDF” that acts as a piezoelectric polymer - so when rain hits Sang-Kyun Park’s umbrella, the beating of the rain down on the material gives it a charge to power the light.  So, the harder the rain, the more light you have.

How’s that for fantastic?  Any better in your eyes now?

Thanks, Yanko Design!

LEDs Mag has an article about Denver’s Botanical Gardens, and their enormous display of lights.  LED lighting, to be specific - their people have installed over 500,000 LED sources in their Christmas display.  The gardens apparently has over a million sources in their display, but only half of them are LED.

I live here in Denver, which is why this is news.  But also - in a place like Denver, why aren’t all of them LED?  If Columbus, OH can do it, why can’t we?

I also used to live in Columbus.  Really - if Columbus can do it, Denver can adapt.

Wanna go see the beautiful display?

Contact:
Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield
8500 Deer Creek Canyon Road
Littleton, Colorado, USA

E-mail: JonesW@botanicgardens.org

Web Site: www.botanicgardens.org

Osram Sylvania is going to be introducing a line of standardized LED modules in 2009, effectively (and affectionately) called the “Joule” System.  LEDs Mag has an article about the upcoming LED module, with all of its 50mm standardized automotive LED system glory.  An Osram spokesman, David Hulick, had this to say about the Ostar headlamp:

“The JFL2 is well suited for daytime running lights and fog lights, but very clearly also functions for  headlamp apps of the future. It’s amazingly compact. It has very long life. The quality of the light output - very crisp clear light - will also be very attractive.”

The Ostar system is a forward lighting system - basically replacing existing technology in headlamps and tail lights.  One of the main pieces of good news is that it cuts down on consumer cost - Hulick, in his conference, said that the average dealer price for a custom array LED rig for your rear lights runs about $300, whereas the Ostar rig will be around $174, or 71% less.

Cool.

It looks like GE is going to stop developing incandescent technology.  More specifically, they are ceasing development of their high-efficiency incandescent lamps (HEI’s).  We were going to be seeing an HEI lamp with no mercury and better light quality than that of a CFL, but bans that have been coming as close as 2012 from places like Australia, Canada, and some US states have made GE change their minds.

GE will now be focusing on LED lamps and their OLED brethren.  David Schuellerman from GE said, about their current plans:

GE Consumers & Industrial and GE Global Research have suspended the development of the high-efficiency incandescent lamp (HEI) to place greater focus and investment on what we believe will be the ultimate in energy efficient lighting — light emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). Research and development of these technologies is moving at an impressive pace and will be ready for general lighting in the near future. LEDs and OLEDs used in general lighting are now poised to surpass the projected efficiency levels of HEI, along with other energy-efficient technologies like fluorescent, and have the additional benefits of long life and durability.

Thanks, Clean Technica, for the article!

The inventor of the Segway - you know, the lean and go thing - has an island that has in its future a net zero energy badge.  North Dumpling, his 3 acre island is located off of the coast of Connecticut.  Net Zero means that Mr. Kamen’s island (or The Kingdom of North Dumpling) is 100% off-the-grid, per se.  He does not depend on services at all.

Fritz Morgan, the Chief Technology Officer for Philips/Color Kinetics has helped Kamen with this feat - as of the next year, Kamen’s island will be lit up in brilliant color and quality (and with 70% less energy consumption, apparently) by a bunch of gear from Philips/Color Kinetics.

Thanks to DesignBoom!

Also, here’s the press release by Philips.

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.