LED

Waarmakers Ninebyfour.

Most fluorescent style light fixtures are for lack of a better term, ugly. This partly due to the need for ballast, the power supply, and the heat the lamps give off. Waarmakers however has created Ninebyfour a tube lamp using LED’s. Because they don’t generate heat, or have a large power supply this minimal lamp is quite beautiful, and one made from uncharacteristic materials.

The lamps are designed and built with reclaimed wood that comes from salvaged trees cut down in and around the Amsterdam area. Each lamp comes with a location marker stamped in the cork portion of the fixture. If you enter the coordinates in Google Maps, the origin of your lamps source tree shows up.

MINI Art Beat, Vine, and Rolling Social Media.

Pushing the boundaries on Social Advertising, MINI has converted a Mini Countryman into a rolling billboard powered by Vine video streams. The Countryman is covered in thousands of LED lights arranged in a structured array on the vehicle. The LED lights are fed Vine video streams which play back on the car as it cruises the streets of London at night. Now this is a pretty inventive way to use the Twitter owned social media video site. The entire backstory on the production, technology, and campaign can be found at the MINI Space Blog here.

Philips and Apple Team Up To Make Your House Smarter and Brighter.

I really like the idea of using LED light bulbs in my house. I just wish they weren’t so expensive. What I might start doing is replacing them one at a time in order to keep the cost down, and make my house greener.

A few months back Philips introduced a new LED light that is now going to be carried exclusively in Apple stores around the world. The Philips Hue is a smart LED bulb that aims to shake up the home automation market by allowing the bulb to be controlled via a smartphone app that runs on iOS and Android.

With support for up to 50 bulbs, Philips Hue offers up to 80 percent less power than a traditional bulb, lasts up to 15 years, and changes color. The cost will set you back a bit though, with each bulb costing $59.00. When the bulbs go on sale tomorrow, you will be able to buy them in starter pack sets of 3 which includes a bridge, that connects the bulbs to your wireless router and with each other using the open ZigBee Light Link standard. Once you have the bulbs connected, they link with the Hue smartphone and tablet apps.

Using the smartphone app, users can personalize their lighting settings, program times and utilize Philips “LightRecipes” to set the mood for your house or room at a specific time.

Art and Science Collide. “Patterned by Nature”.

Commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for their newly built research center, Patterned by Nature is a 10 foot wide by 90 foot long ribbon that winds through the five story atrium of the building. The sculpture celebrates the abstraction of nature’s infinite complexity into patterns through the scientific process.

Running on a low 75 watts of power, Patterned by Nature is made of 3600 tiles of LCD glass that animate light in patterns across scales of space and time. Animations are created by independently varying the transparency of each piece of glass.

The video below is a wonderful showcase to the piece, which I’m sure looks even more amazing in person.

“The content cycles through twenty programs, ranging from clouds to rain drops to colonies of bacteria to flocking birds to geese to cuttlefish skin to pulsating black holes. The animations were created through a combination of algorithmic software modeling of natural phenomena and compositing of actual footage.

An eight channel soundtrack accompanies the animations on the ribbon, giving visitors clues to the identity of the pixelated movements. In addition, two screens show high resolution imagery and text revealing the content on the ribbon at any moment.”