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."

Comments

LED art

[saskboy]

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.

damnit

[MOMOCROME]

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.

Re:damnit

[Anonymous Coward]

Although, if the reporting is accurate and she did indeed try to walk through a security checkpoint, wearing a bundle of wires and circuitry on her chest without responding to security personnel when they asked what the thing on her shirt was, the blame for that incident lies squarely on the MIT student's shoulders. While the reporting was heinously distortive, it was never quite as wrong as you got it.

Not even faux news said she tried to walk through a "security checkpoint" - all she did was ask a question of the person at the info desk.

The person at the info desk - NOT EVEN VAGUELY SECURITY PERSONNEL - asked her what the LEDS were, she said "art" and then continued about her business.

The blame lies solely on stupid CYA security policies that require a "response no matter what" -- that's escalation without application of rational thinking. You've got one dumb cluck of a info-desk clerk, who probably doesn't even have a high school diploma, causing a major incident that could have been easily avoided if anyone at any step of the way had applied a degree of critical thought to the issue. What's next? Exvacutation because someone dreams about a bomb?

Don't think for a minute that any of this anti-terrorism "security" is about protecting anyone from actual threats. They might as well name them the Department of the CYA because their sole purpose is to protect the asses of the people in charge. If they react completely out of proportion to any perceived threat, then when an actual threat slips through they can point at all of their over-the-top reactions in the past as proof of 'diligence' thus insuring their asses are well covered, and may even get increased funding...

This institutionalized cowardice is destroying our country, it has got to stop or we will never be able to maintain our status as the largest superpower.

It's a nice project, but...

[megaditto]

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.

Don't forget to wear sunglasses.

[cjdavis]

Doesn't UV cause cataracts?

Ah yes, from the article:

As a word of warning, the NCSU034A LEDs output over 300mW of UV light at 385nm! This is a LOT! What makes them especially dangerous is that the die is only a millimeter or two on a side, so the angular intensity of the light is extremely high. Do *NOT* turn these on in an environment where anyone can look directly at them. They are extremely dangerous to the eye, and you will have a *permanent* blind spot if you look directly at them. To make them safe, I used polyethylene plastic sandwiching a Luminit Holographic Light Shaping Diffuser (LSD... yeah, I know, they came up with the acronym first) an inch and a half away from the board to make the apparent source size over an inch in diameter. This decreases the angular intensity from the class 3b level to the class 1 level. I am not liable if you blind yourself by using these LEDs! Seriously, don't fuck around with these.

Funny story that. Every time I tell an MIT student that the UV LEDs will permanently blind them if they remove the cover, the response is the same. First, they say "Really?", and then they attempt to look into the endcap. True story. Explains a lot, I think.

Re:Don't forget to wear sunglasses.

[ardle]

I got quite bad eye-burn from a UV spotlight (was standing about 2 metres from it for about 2 hours): not a nice experience.
Didn't notice any effect until about the following evening (thought something was in my eye). I woke in the middle of that night with stabbing pains in my eyes. Next day, daylight hurt my eyes. I couldn't even look at the flame of a candle. Thankfully, eye ointment soothed it and the problem eased the next day (disappeared over the next two or three).
Doctor couldn't figure out what had happned to me - I only figured it out (after the visit) cos the weather was cold and relief of cold breeze on my face made me realise I had got sunburnt!

Re:Don't forget to wear sunglasses.

[dattaway]

I brought a homemade 250mW laser to work one day. I warned everyone exactly what it could do. What is the FIRST thing each guy did? Try to aim it in each other's faces. True. Lights are like toys and turns people into kids. Get ready to grab it out of their hands.

Art with LED

[GregPK]

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...

Re:Art with LED

[Peeet]

Well, speaking from the event production industry (lighting for theatre, film, concerts and conventions) I don't see it coming that quickly. There are ways for LEDs to take over this industry, but they all depend on some other technology or innovation happening first. LED based fixtures are starting to be used as a tool, but they are in their own category, not as a replacement for an already existing tool. The problems that LEDs have are their color rendering index, their lack of brightness and the inability to dim them via the equipment currently used in almost every theater and production company in the industry (dimmers, PARs and Ellipsoidals). Color rendering is being addressed in the same manner as this MIT student (Selador's x7 series uses 7 different color LEDs to expand their palette) and brightness is fast becoming a non-issue as 3 watt LEDs are becoming commonplace. But dimming is the deal breaker as the industry is saturated with SCR based dimmers that control a majority of the conventional lighting fixtures by way of dimming their main AC input.

For LEDs to be viable, they would have to be able to replace the HPL lamp that is used by the defacto industry standard lighting fixtures: ETC's Source Four PARs and Ellipsoidals. These "conventional" lights plug into distribution cabling that goes directly back to a dimmer rack of some sort where the AC voltage is varied by way of using an SCR to chop the AC waveform at various points thus varying the voltage output and dimming the incandescent lamp. LEDs use DC power and are dimmed by flashing them on and off very quickly (at a constant voltage) and varying the amount of time that they are on versus off to create the illusion of dimming. If you were to put an LED controller onto a dimmed AC circuit, it would fry the controller much the same way that an electric motor would get fried if it were on a dimmed circuit. Sine Wave dimming (new technology) may change this, but that needs to happen first and LEDs second.

There other ins for LEDs to take over this industry. The other half of the lighting industry (seen more in concerts and conventions and less in theatre and film) is moving lights. They mostly use arc based light sources and are dimmed by way of a motorized shutter blocking the light coming out of the fixture. The power input for these types of fixtures is then run separately straight from the power source and not from a dimmer (just like current LED fixtures). They are very bright and have a slightly colder color temperature and lower color rendering index (also similar to LED fixtures). LEDs would be a perfect fit for moving lights and it is only a matter of time before we see new fixtures being developed with clusters of LEDs powering them rather than an arc lamp. The only problem with this is that it is hard to make optics that will still focus sharp with a source that has multiple points of origination.

The final point I will make addresses this problem, I believe. Once you start seeing high powered video projectors running off of LEDs rather than arc lamps (as most are now) then there will be no excuse for LEDs not to take hold of the lighting industry as we are also experiencing another revolution where traditional moving lights whose beams are shaped and colored by metal patterns and glass color filters that are mechanically placed in front of the beam inside the fixture are being replaced by essentially video projectors on moving yokes that project all of the colors and patterns by way of a computer video output. Once video projectors have been taken over by LEDs, THEN I predict, at least in this industry, we will start to see some tool replacement rather than just toolbox supplement.

Fascinating

[djlemma]

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...

Re:Fascinating

[batkiwi]

He gets it but just has a bit of a typo. If you read the rest of that paragraph it's obvious he meant "You mix red light and green light, you get what appears to be yellow light."

I say this because he later remarks on:
-"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"
-pointing a "yellow" LED at "yellow" paint (black!!)
-pointing an "orange" LED at "orange" paint made by mixing yellow and red paints (red!!)
etc

Don't crucify him for just one word mixed up.

Meh

[timeOday]

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...

Worst. Explanation. Evar.

[Alex Belits]

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

Their clean web page needs no apology

[Morgaine]

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.