Control Lightshow Over Dublin Sky From A Webpage

nev4 writes "Ireland is celebrating their EU presidency for 2004 with an interactive lightshow over Dublin. The project, Vectorial Elevation, allows people to control the 22 searchlights (154,000 watts, can be seen for a 15km radius) shining over Dublin by submitting a design on the project's website. The designs are queued and a new design is displayed every 14 seconds from dusk to dawn (GMT +1). You can see an aerial view of the city and the current design via live webcam or browse snapshots of previous designs. The tool for submitting deisgns also contains a 3D model of the city that you can pan around or "walk-through". Once you submit your design, you can opt to receive an e-mail when it is being displayed; when I submitted mine there was no one in the queue, so it was displayed immediately."

Comments

In other news...

[jwitch]

People who do not RTFA would notice it would be extremely hard to represent a picture using only 22 uniformly fixed searchlights.

This week's crossword puzzle prize is a brand new set of crayons.

Im in Dublin ..

[Fawad]

And I can say they're pretty amazing - the range is much more than 15km (I saw them visiting a friend from Leixlip over 25km away). They make this city beautiful - The messages were uncensored initially, but then the authorities smartned up - to an extent! :) Try submitting something in a different language..

Campaign for Dark Skies

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a pleasant sight if you are interested in preserving the night sky.

Once again the environment suffers to satisfy the vanity of politicians.

The night sky should be dark as this allows wildlife to not be disturbed, we save energy reducing CO2 emmissions and the next generation of kids might just get interested in astronomy and science in general.

http://www.dark-skies.org/

Aside from this - yes of course its pretty - but I'd like it to be limited up to 12 midnight, and only use sodium light which can be filtered out.

Clear dark and steady skies

Torcuill
www.aberdeenastro.btinternet.co.uk

ATTENTION: Parent is FUNNY, NOT OFFTOPIC !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me explain for the clueless: The guy is saying that readers of slashdot, on seeing the story, will RTFA and then proceed to make their own lightshows. And being slashdotters, what kinds of lightshows will they create?

Ones saying

First Post!

... of course.

Dumb mods ...

Ummm. Wouldn't it be better at night?

[mykepredko]

Before going ahead and spending an hour creating your masterpiece, wouldn't it be a good idea that you first check to see what the conditions are like?

Right now in Toronto (Eastern Daylight Savings Time) it is 11:30 AM and in Dublin it is 4:27:56 PM IST (Irish Standard Time?).

It might be a good idea to wait a few hours before submitting your project, designed to be intuitively obvious to any extraterrestrial beings that there is intelligent life on Earth...

myke

Great Project

[bjpirt]

Another version of the original which took place in Mexico for the millennium by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

This guy does get up to some really interesting stuff.

Speer

[Quila]

Too bad Albert Speer isn't still alive. He knew how to arrange a searchlight light show!

Re:Units ?

[Anonymous Coward]

$ units -v 15km miles
15km = 9.3205679 miles
15km = (1 / 0.1072896) miles
$ units -v 154000watts 'libraries of congress'
Unknown unit 'libraries' :)

A watt is a unit of power, a typical lightbulb to light a room has 100W, a typical PC power supply has 250W. I don't know what strange units you use in US, so I can't convert... perhaps:

$ units -v 154000watts hp
154000watts = 206.5174 hp
154000watts = (1 / 0.004842207) hp

Error in main posting? Not about EU presidency?

[zoney_ie]

Surely its celebrating the accession of 10 new EU members (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Rep., Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Malta and Cyprus on May 1st) swelling us to the largest organised group of people on the earth after India and China?

I'm sure our country isn't so egotistic to celebrate a usual (even if rare) event such as the EU presidency.

Could someone fix the posting?

Re:Error in main posting? Not about EU presidency?

[nev4]

Sorry I should have been more specific, it is celebrating the accomplishments of the EU as a whole under the Irish presidency (hence the location). That's not to say that the Irish administration is responsible for the expansion (nor are they trying to take credit for it), but rather the administration is using the presidency as a platform to welcome the new member states. My apologies again for not clarifying this in the original post.

Re:Ummm. Wouldn't it be better at night?

[Tomahawk]

The articles does say that is runs from dusk till dawn...

Currently, there is a 10 hour wait, and it's 5pm here. The lights won't start until sometime after 9 when it's dark enough to see the lights.

Incidently, you get emailed a link to a webpage so that you can see you design from 4 different cameras.

T.

Re:Astronomy

[aurelian]

There isn't really one.

There are astronomers working in Dublin (a small number of them anyhow), some of them with connections to Dublin University. However, as with all other cities elsewhere in the world, nobody (to my knowledge) does any observation work from Dublin or its environs any more. They used to, at Dunsink Observatory.

Re:Woo!

[Kohath]

I think it would only work if your phone number is all 1s.

And that's my phone number.