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MIT Student Gets Artistic With LED Art
Gibbs-Duhem writes "An MIT graduate student has up a page showcasing a standout art project. He's designed custom LED light fixtures which are seven times brighter than the closest similar commercial models, and include colors which can't be reproduced by a normal RGB cluster (including two ridiculously bright UV LEDs). The result: some beautiful mixed media artwork. The author's goal is to eventually publish a guide to make getting into creating such artwork more accessible to the general public. The site includes lots of great photos and a movie of the art in action. It also has in depth descriptions of the theory involved in this relatively new form of art, an explanation of how the paints were chosen, and an in depth technical discussion of how such lights are designed with schematics and board layouts for those who might wish to build their own lights."
I've thought for a while that there are great possibilities for LED art. One project I'm not ambitious enough to set out to complete, would be a country's flag, arranged like lite-brites into the recognizable pattern and colours. The whole thing would be powered by a tiny windmill, making it a wind powered flag.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I misread it as "MIT Student Gets Arrested With LED Art" which is of course very exciting as it suggests LED Art is now illegal in Mass.
It's strange to feel all deflated by reading about a cool and hackish thing like that.
It's a real shame they don't make LEDs that emit UV-C. Those would be much better at burning retinas and giving people skin cancer.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Ah yes, from the article:
The Mona Lisa is lit up with LED's Buckingham Palace is converting over to all LED lighting http://www.flickr.com/photos/lastboltnut/1466712839/. Many cities around the world are converting to LED lighting. It is really quite spectacular transformation of lighting in the world.
I expect to see 90 percent of lighting changed over to LED lighting by 2015...
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Whatever happened to the difference between art and design?
I haven't read the whole article, but anything having to do with LED technology is interesting to me. It's interesting, though, that the author doesn't seem to understand color mixing in pigment vs. light.
He says-
"You mix red paint and green light, you get what appears to be yellow light."
That's not true. If you mix red LIGHT and green light, you get what looks like yellow light. If you shine green light on red paint you get a ugly dark mess. The red paint doesn't reflect the green light very well- the reason it's red is because it reflects the red portion of the spectrum. So, when you light it with green, the light that's reflected off the red is not going to be very intense, it certainly won't be yellow.
Also important is the fact that green is a primary color in light, while yellow is a primary color in pigment. If you shine green light on yellow paint, you'll actually reflect a lot of green, and if you shine yellow light on green paint it'll also (you guessed it) reflect lots of green.
I think it's interesting that he's finding out how the horrible color rendition capabilities of LED's can be used to one's advantage, but I don't know if he really understands all the theory involved...
the results properly on your plain old RGB monitor / LCD.
What's the big deal with this "can't be reproduced by a normal RGB cluster"? All the colors in the screenshots look pretty normal to me, nothing out of the regular gamut. Just like all these suckers and their (so-called) "high-def" TVs, which I've seen in many commercials yet none showing a better picture than the fine Trinitron I already have. Nothing to see here...
There was an LED art installation. It consisted of pretty large array of rgb leds arranged into cube. The LEDs were housed in what looked like ping pong balls or something to this effect. The effects it could produce were phenomenal. The switching was obviously extremely configurable as they were able to amazing shows. Imagine seeing shapes created by these leds moving in any directions (migrating to different leds obviously), changing colours etc. Could only find this video of it. Would have been better to have taken it a bit further away. http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=FGNQDpJdl14
I record my sleeptalking
A very, very cool project. I wonder if a similar project could produce colored lighting for artistic photography. Heh, by the scan of the schematic, it looks like he's using EAGLE for his PCB design. EAGLE is a very good program.
Didn't some MIT idiot pushed her way past aitport security with LED-lightwork and an exposed circuit board less than a year ago? I'm too lazy to google it (I'm can't be bothered to fact check when posting to /.), but the incident stands out in memory.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
The pic with the 2-tone room (red half, green half) makes me want to convert mine. Anyone know where people can buy colored LED lighting for @home, indoor application? I've not had a lot of success searching in the past.
I wouldn't use his PCB designs. Goodness, there are 90 degree trace turns everywhere and no copper fills. Makes me dizzy looking at it. Oh well.
Theory
The first step of the project was to understand the underlying physics behind LED based artwork. Fundamentally, the eyes are a very odd sensing system. The ears do a frequency based analysis of incoming pressure waves, and report all of the dominant frequencies to the brain for interpretation --- if we hear two frequencies of different pitches, they sound distinct. This isn't quite as true when you talk about harmonics of sounds, as they will start to affect the timbre instead of sounding as a distinct pitch, but the basic idea is that we can pick out independent sounds with different pitches fairly easily.
The eyes, on the other hand, do spatial and frequency-based sensing; however, they throw away much of the information about the specific frequencies detected. For instance, if you look at any particular spot, you will see a single color -- not a spectral map of the complete visible spectrum coming from that point. This is great for the purposes of vision; it would be rather difficult, I think, to walk around while receiving that much information. However, this means that the eye behaves very strangely in the presence of multiple colors from the same location.
The classical example of this effect is the color wheel. You mix red paint and green light, you get what appears to be yellow light. But how is this possible? If yellow is a frequency of light, how does mixing red (620nm) and green (530nm) produce yellow (590nm) light? There is certainly no physical process that does this sort of mixing in general.
In fact, the idea that red and green combine to form yellow is a trick of the mind only. You may think you're seeing yellow light, but the fact is that you are seeing independent red and green light, and your brain is converting that information into the appearance of yellow! Very strange. So, this can explain how a RGB cluster of LEDs can produce most colors of light -- they aren't actually producing those other frequencies of light; instead they are tricking the eyes into thinking that they are producing those other frequencies of light. This trick is summed up in the Chromaticity Diagram (pulled from wikipedia). On this diagram, pure frequencies are displayed along the outer border from 460 to 700nm. As you mix two colors together, you draw a line between their positions on the border, and the ratio of the two tells you the position in the diagram that your apparent color lies. For example, if you combine 520nm green light with 620nm red light in a 50-50 ratio, you will have what appears to be yellow light. Likewise, if you have 620nm red light and 490nm cyan light in a 50-50 ratio, you will have what appears to be approximately white light.
I have never seen a worse explanation of color vision.
It would be sufficient to say this:
Human eyes' colored light sensors cover wide ranges of wavelengths with maximums at red, white and blue, so they can easily see colors of mixed paints (also wide ranges of wavelengths with multiple maximums) and have those colors imitated by LED screens and lights (three very NARROW ranges of frequencies near the maximums of eye sensors' sensitivity) however mixing the two (light from three narrow-band sources is reflected by wide-band paint, then seen by three types of wide-band sensors) produces distorted results because paint's reflectivity of wavelengths outside the lights' narrow bands does not contribute to the impression.
A paint with one of the narrow maximums at, say, cyan, will appear the same as paint without such a maximum if illuminated by a LED light that produces nothing in cyan range where the maximum is present. It's important to mention that in a photo taken under natural light and displayed on a LED screen, paints' colors will appear perfectly normal. This happens because light and camera's sensors cover approximately the same ranges as human eyes' sensors, so for the area covered with paint that has cyan maximum, screen would produce more green and blue light to imitate the impression on
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
From TFA: Apologies in advance for this being a simple html website. I'm a scientist/engineer, not a graphic designer.
No apologies needed. I wish all web pages were as clean as yours, instead of covered in irrelevant decor, side panels and advertising that just obscures the message and makes loading times 10 times as long as they should be.
Google's minimalist search page stands almost alone in retaining functional sanity among major websites. Don't feel bad emulating that frugality.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Look at the last two photos in the media section..
09-f9-11-02-9* (G^GCA_++{>. RV>>>>+++ NO CARRIER
Remember the guys on the Los Alamos project who thought it was cool to have a lump of gold plated plutonium on a stand so you could feel how warm it was? And then there was the scientist I once had the pleasure of working with who thought it was clever to have his 5kV capacitor bank with the live prongs exposed and joined by a copper rod, though the CEO did get pushed out of the way before he could touch them and kill himself. As my physics teacher used to say "Physicists have their own version of natural selection", though he was talking about some people he had worked with who couldn't be bothered to use the shielding when working with X-rays.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Some grad student is lighting up his mom's artwork with LEDs, and this is news?
"gets artistic with...art"
Incredible. Next thing you know, people will be getting ingenious with ingenuity.
Luxeon Rebels and Vs? Yawn! I've been running those under PWM for over 2 years. Presently I'm rigging an RGB LEDEngin 15W Light Engine w/ 1.5 A buck boosts running through a fiber bundle conduit to drive a DLP. Had to go out and get some arctic silver epoxy and P3 heatsinks to handle the heat.
Maybe the current state of LED tech will make it to MIT in a couple of years.
Sweet... When all my my CFL's burn out in approx 2012, then I can replace them all with LED bulbs.
I wish I had mod points today for 'informative', because the article points out something that's not intuitively obvious and explains an observation I've made for the past 2-3 years (the time since RGB LED theater lights started to become commonplace) -- why things illuminated by the "white" light from a RGB triad tend to look like crap. Specifically, the observation that if you shine "yellow" light produced by red and green LEDs onto a surface that's painted/colored yellow, the surface looks almost black, and if you shine "orange" light produced by red and green LEDs onto an orange surface, it appears to be bright red.
In retrospect, it makes sense, and I feel like kicking myself because I should have figured it out a long time ago from what I know about light bulbs and color-rendering index (CRI). The reason halogen lightbulbs have a high CRI (~98 or ~99 when running at full power, I believe, compared to midday cloudless summer sunlight's CRI of 100) is because they produce light comprised of a nearly infinite number of discrete wavelengths (or at least enough to look like it to the eyes). Likewise, the reason why colors look a little "off" under most CFL bulbs (though often better than incandescent bulbs running at reduced power) is because their CRI tends to be in the low 90s. They produce light that's the sum of a small (few dozen?) number of different wavelengths. If you look at it on a spectrometer, you see a bunch of little spikes with nothing in between. Old/cheap fluorescent bulbs look even worse, because they used fewer different phosphors and had bigger gaps between spikes.
This is relevant, because it makes it obvious why attempts to light a stage using ONLY theater lights comprised of red, green, and blue LEDs will produce less than spectacular (if not downright odd) results -- effectively, a light that produces "white" light from red, green, and blue LEDs is like a poor-quality low-CRI fluorescent light from the distant past... but worse. It's not a question of "temperature" (bluish, yellowish, etc), because your eyes can compensate for THAT (it only becomes a big deal with you're dealing with film, or putting natural and artificial light side by side where they can be visually compared). Ergo, if you wanted to make stage lamps capable of reproducing halfway natural-looking color, you'd need to combine -- at the BARE minimum -- not just red, blue, and green LEDs... but also yellow, and augment it with high-CRI halogen lights. Cyan, magenta, and orange LEDs probably wouldn't hurt, either. You'd use the halogen lights for general illumination, and use the LED lights to tip the color balance for effect (being aware that the more you dim the halogen and brighter you make the LEDs, the more the color quality of the light is going to deteriorate).
However artistic you want to get with LED lights, just don't hang them around town with black electrical tape ;)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Color Kinetics (now owned by Philips) has a patent entitled "Multicolored LED lighting method and apparatus" (6,016,038). It's such a trivial invention which should have prior art. Yet they used it against Super Vision International and it was upheld in court.
I hope this student got a license.
I feel this bit bears repeating. In both the "Mooninite scare" and the Star thing, one very disturbing aspect of all the local reporting was that it was very heavily spun in favor of the city, the TSA, etc. Referring to a pack of D cells and some LEDs as a "Hoax Device" - even when it was already damned obvious that the Mooninites were neither bombs nor hoax bombs - is just a cheap tactic to make people side with the authorities, despite little matters like common sense getting in the way.
Bow-ties are cool.
I'm surprised to see Brian made the front of slashdot for his artwork when his academic work, converting ethanol to H2 by creating Rh and CeO2 nanowires using a genetically engineered T9 capsid as the wire template seems far cooler. Unfortunately, is lab's home page seems to be down at the moment.
Could this ultra-violet LEDs be used to kill the mold and bacteria in the bathroom and kitchen, while nobody is there?
Or are the rays too weak?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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 do not avoid women, Mandrake . . . but I do deny them my essence." - Gen. Ripper
The human eye has detectors for exactly 3 colors: red, green, and blue (barring some genetic mutations). The author claims that RGB will let you get close to any color, when in fact it will produce exactly everything the human eye can see and there is no more color information to be obtained by the human eye, period. He then went on to design an elaborate device with for more than the three primary colors.
Artistically, it's pretty cool.
Scientifically, I they could have done this with 3 LEDs tuned to exactly the frequency of the viewer's primary colors, with no stray frequencies to activate other color receptors, plus maybe UVA and UVB for other effects. Also, I believe there are two frequencies or red and blue that humans may be tuned for, and since they are carried on the X chromosome a woman could have up to 5 primary colors. That would be an interesting project: designing a light just for her.
The author has not done his homework. It's absolutely untrue to state that existing full-color LED lighting products do not go beyond RGB. It's also highly subjective and misleading to state that they are "not nearly good enough for doing high-quality art". I think it's debatable whether this could be called a "new class" of LED illuminator, although the inclusion of near-UV as one of the >3 color channels may be a first. For example, Selador has had products on the market since 2003 - long before this project was begun, which use 7 different wavelengths of LED sources. Their largest fixture puts out nearly 5,000 lumens, twice as much light as he claims for the Ultraluminous Illuminator. http://www.selador.net/ These were developed specifically to address the same true-color and color-rendering limitations, and are becoming increasingly popular in theatrical and studio lighting applications for that reason. There are and have been other LED lights available on the market that incorporate RGB + Amber, and these 4 colors are even available as OEM LED clusters from suppliers such as Lamina, Enfis, and LedEngin. How was the total light output of this device determined? There are many factors such as LED operating temperature which affect actual light output, so one must be careful not to extrapolate from an LED manufacturers' data sheet in order to calculate total light output. The addition of optics, including those cool holographic diffusers, also causes some light loss.