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I would be very interested in seeing these LED setups interact with electroluminescent vinyl. I came across this stuff a few years back when I made custom glow gauges for my CRX. One really interesting thing you can do with this is do a giclee' print on it and then illuminate the art from the canvas itself. It's pretty expensive, or I'd play with it more, but I have done animations by printing on pieces and wiring them into an array (like a blinkenlights thing).

I think the plan is to use The Blinkenlights Project and every hall they can find in a one mile radius.

Speaking of which, I wonder what the largest pixel in the world is.

Blinkenlights?

...it would be playable, but only if you had the side of a hotel to play on...

Really?.

http://www.blinkenlights.de/index.en.html

And I *know* there was a Dutch team that did much the same as well, and a Dutch commercial venture (was it KPN - Dutch telecom?) has one still up and running, I think.

But I guess they didn't use the Ooh! Shiny! blue LEDs :)

Time to add a warning comment on the blinkenlights plugin for your favorite video/music player :)

Just be happy the pixels aren't this size.

I kind of like the option where you can set up areas of the screen that the minimized thrown windows will bounce off of. It can be interesting when you control these surfaces with joysticks. You can see it here.

There's been a bigger one though so it's not as cool.

> > My 80486DX4 is only VGA (640x480), you insensitive clod!
>
> My TI-83 is only 96x64, you insensitive clod!

What about Blinkenlights, which is fscking big, but sitll only 18x8, you insensitive clods!

"I apologize to those people who may be angry with me, but hopefully most will see the humor in the whole situation ... and realize that my attempt to bring joy and a smile to people's faces was successful"

Personally I wasn't too impressed with the site to begin with, hoax or not. It didn't hold a candle to the likes of the Chaos Computer Club's Blinkenlights project.

Adding JNG support to the GIMP plug-in would be trivial. As soon as MNG is finally put back into the Mozilla trunk, I promise to add JNG support for the GIMP MNG plug-in.

"Mozilla won't show you the thing." is just plain wrong though. I've created animations using JNG chunks and the Mozilla firefox extension shows them just fine.

BTW, "Die Warteschleife" was used by the Berlin Chaos Computer Club in the Blinkenlights project.

All the time

OMG they could play Pong on a building.

for people to lazy to click on the link, the Blinkenlights project wired up light bulbs behind every window of a large office building and allowed them to be remote-controlled by a computer.

They had a building-size dot matrix display at night. For text messages, and Pong over the mobile phone! just call a number, and play.
It looks awesome. Too bad it's not operational anymore.

and the blinkenlights projects
http://www.blinkenlights.de

good stuff

Never seen this?

The CCC already did this with an office building in Berlin... The surface was bigger and you had the SDK to send pictures (animated or not).
And by the way, I this this chandelier idea sucks, it's not hacker's technology, it's art and advertisement combined.

Isn't this similar to the blinkenlights project?

Blinkenlights did the sme sort of thing: play a game on a giant screen from your phone. Of course, they didn't have the fancy color and high resolution of a Times Square billboard, but they did have open source code and the cool hack of turning windows into pixels. Plus, you could post your own animations and images, in addition to just playing games. 2600 used an image of big brother from blinkenlights as its Winter 2002 cover.

I want to enable this to use blinkenlights, then play Space Invaders on this!

This project reminds me of Blinkenlights... This was an awesome project where you could display a small picture/animation/play pong/other on a building using the windows and interior lights as pixels. http://blinkenlights.de/

I was lucky enough to get the text from here, already, so here it is:

Blinkenlights Reloaded

Die Matrix kehrt zuruck!

Vom 22.12. bis zum 04.01.2003 wird es ein kurzes Revival unserer Installation aus Berlin geben: Blinkenlights Reloaded. Uber die Weihnachtsfeiertage bespielen wir das noch in Sanierung befindliche Haus des Lehrers erneut und nach bekanntem Rezept. Eine neue Version vonBlinkenPaint erlaubt das Erstellen von Animationen und die Pong und die Loveletters konnen wieder uber das Telefon abgerufen werden.

Die Telefondienste stehen wieder unter der Rufnummer 0190-987654 bereit. Ein Anruf kostet EUR 1,24 pro Minute (sekundengenaue Abrechnung). Die Einnahmen fliessen als Spende an den CCC zur Deckung der Betriebskosten, damit Blinkenlights auch in Zukunft werbefrei bleibt.

Blinkenlights Reloaded setzt die Technologie ein, die wir fur die InstallationArcade im letzten Jahr in Paris entwickelt haben. Damit konnen wir auch mit Graustufen umgehen. Die neue Version 3 von BlinkenPaint unterstutzt dies genauso wie das von uns bevorzugte Format BML.

Wir laden Euch erneut dazu ein, das ihr uns Animationen schickt, die wir dann auf dem Haus zum Spielen bringen. Das geht so: [1] Erstellt die Filme mit BlinkenPaint, [2] speichert sie als Textdatei ab (BML) und [3] hangt dann diese Datei an eine Mail an und schickt Sie an
movies@blinkenlights.de

Wenn der Film ein Blinkenlights Loveletter ist und Ihr einen Freischaltcode fur das Telefon erhalten wollt, um den Film jederzeit selbst aufrufen zu konnen, schickt den Film stattdessen an loveletters@blinkenlights.de.

Wir freuen uns, wieder die Gelegenheit zu haben, Blinkenlights zum Laufen zu bringen und hoffen, dass es auch (noch) nicht das letzte Mal war. Fur uns war die erste Installation ein grosser Spass und das soll er nun wieder werden (wer die Originalinstallation nicht kennt, kann sich ja nochmal einen Eindruck durch unser Video machen).

Ausserdem hoffen wir, dass uns die Einsendungen nicht uberfluten. Da wir alle wahrend der Leuchtzeit auch noch kraftig mit dem Chaos Communication Congress beschaftigt sind, kann auch mal was verloren gehen. Wir bitten um Nachsicht, werden uns aber bemuhen alle Anfragen zu bearbeiten.

You all speak german, so there is no need for me to translate it, right? :-)

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File).

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes.

For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here.

Overview

Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest.

For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page.

WebCam

Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon.

The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.

Contact

Although the installation itself is now dismantled, the Blinkenlights project group is still active. Your contact for inquiries of all kinds is Tim Pritlove contact@blinkenlights.de.

If you are interested getting information on our future activities, please send a mail to blinkenlights-update-subscribe@lists.ccc.de.

You have a Blinkenlights INSTAkiss!
To view your Blinkenlights INSTAkiss, please visit blinkenlights.de and enter your AOL username and password. Somebody loves you, find out who right now! Click here NOW!!!

My first thought, he should combine this with the blinkenlights engine, so he can play tetris on it :D

You've got it backwards. The CCC offers HTTPS for a reason. The article should read:

"From 07.-10. August, we from the Chaos Computer Club have another Chaos Communication Camp. Please be sure to visit us at the BlinkenArea, a place where we show the newest projects and technology derived of Blinkenlights, the famous installation on Berlin's 'House of the Teacher'."

Build Blinkenlights on your school building or a nearby tower of your choice. The Chaos Computer Club did it, why not YOU? (The tools are GPL)

...was playing Pong on the Berlin Alexanderplatz. It was just bizarre to stand in front of that big building and being able to control the lights of the windows with a cellphone. Too bad it is no more...

The CCC is actually more than 20 years old. Maybe you even saw their anniversary project. It had appearences in several music videos.

Q: What is the CCC?

A: The CCC is a galactic community of human beings including all ages, genders, races and social positions. We demand freedom and flow of information without censorship. Although we enjoy to discuss and analyze recent advances in information technology, our focus is on addressing the issues of our time by giving targeted recommendations for a public policy able to deal with these issues in an intelligent manner. While this also includes more or less spectacular endeavours the focus of our work is on creating a public awareness for the need to approach issues like (e.g.) security, privacy and key escrow from a more informed, open viewpoint. If you are interested in supporting these goals, then the CCC is for you. If not, you might want to consider looking at other, more technically oriented computer clubs. We do NOT select our members on some dubious "elite" criteria. As it will be difficult for you to contribute to our efforts in Germany, in case that you are interested I suggest that you contact us again (identifying yourself with your real name) for a contact at the CCC-Bay Area (our only overseas operation so far). Sorry, the rest of this FAQ is in German only. If you'd like to translate this stuff, please mail!

err... if you actually read the site, setting this up involved painting every window white and wiring up 160 lamps with over 5000m of cable.

That's one heck of a covert operation if you can pull that off without a little inside assistance!

Yes, you can!

actually, blinkenlights was around back then, check this all your base animation..

The Blinkenlights people have a page about the Paris project here.

It sounds really cool. Based upon what I've heard on the radio, it is designed so that someone in Paris can call it on their mobile phone and play Tetris, Pong, Breakout, etc.

Plus, you can submit animated GIFs to them and they will play it. Neat.

There is a new version currently in Paris: http://www.blinkenlights.de/arcade/index.en.html

Blinkenlights has a version of pong that really is quite fancy, it is building sized. Though it apparenly isn't chic enough for a story.

If we get close enough to the WTC, maybe we can play blinkenlights tetris on it...

Check out its 11 minutes documentary on http://blinkenlights.de/video.en.html... It was very cool to watch. :)

If this story was only posted four months earlier CmdrTaco could have been even more 'romantic' and asked Kathleen to marry him via LED. It's almost as nostalgic as those blinking office lights in Germany.

You know this, right? If not, have a look...

Well I guess I now know why the ccc (chaos computer club) stopped this, they where afraid their pong tactics would get stolen (read this site, its just a perfect hack)

The most stripped down version - or the most advanced - depending how you see it, is probably this one.

I wonder if greyscale pictures could be achieved at blinkenlights.de by rapidly flashing pixels on and off? The Specs say that you can get as short as 1 millisecond for one frame!

I gathered similar projects into a single comment. I know that this is redundant, strictly speaking, but I'll post anyway. It's much more accessible this way. I'm knocking on the karma cap anyway, so no, this isn't whoring, just risking to get modded down for redundancy. Enough blabber, here we go:

Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlights, Berlin, Germany
18 x 8 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.blinkenlights.de/

KPN Building, Rotterdam, Netherlands
22 x 44 matrix of green lights
Links:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/makiueda/climbman/index-e.h tml
http://www.blezer2.myweb.nl/rotterdam2000/building s/kpn.html

La Bastille: A Tech House Installation, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
10 x 10 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://bastilleweb.techhouse.org/
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/16/2148245.shtm l

Marnix 2001, Brussels, Belgium
52 x 7 matrix of RGB lights
Links:
http://marnix2001.bbl.be/

TU-Delft Electro Technology SMS-Display, Delft, Netherlands
264 lights (unknown configuration), displayed mobile phone short messages
Links:
http://etv.its.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/stunt .php

TU-Delft Electro Technology Tetris, Delft, Netherlands
10 x 15 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://etv.et.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/90/eng lish.html

MIT's Green Building Sound (VU) Meter, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
9 x 1 matrix of red lights
Links:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1993/green_bldg _vu_meter/green_bldg_vu_meter.html

Clickscape 98, Linz, Austria
13 x 8 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.servus.at/clickscape98/

Poli-uni students dorm, Warsaw, Poland
14 x 16 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.astercity.net/~kvas/riviera.jpg

http://berlin.ccc.de/~hans/cam2.jpg

Also see the site dedicated to the event here.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations can be seen. But there is an interactive component as well: you can play the old arcade classic pong on the house using your mobile phone and you can place your own loveletters on the screen

Another cool thing is that they also distributed some programs to help you visualize the movies here.

And to think that I thought putting my xmas lights up and controllng them with X10 modules was pretty nifty. Oh well, time to start thinking bigger for next year!

Is that they ported pong to it.

Damn these guys are cool (in an ultra-geeky way).