Turning SF's Bay Bridge Into a Giant LED Display

waderoush writes "It may be the biggest art hack ever: a project to install 25,000 individually addressable LED lights on the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. New York-based 'light sculptor' Leo Villareal was in San Francisco last week to test the vast 'Bay Lights' art installation, which will officially debut on March 5 and last for two years; Xconomy has photos and video of Villareal running the light show from his laptop. To optimize his algorithms and figure out which patterns would be most interesting or arresting, Villareal needed to experiment on the bridge itself, says Bay Lights director Ben Davis, who has raised $5.8 million for the project so far. 'This has never been done before in history — literally debugging software 500 feet in the air, in front of a million people,' says Davis."

Comments

Rearranging the patterns != debugging

[Gothmolly]

Lets stop the overuse and abuse of legitimate technical terms already. It's like calling him a "hacker" - oh wait, TFA and TFEditor already did. I guess it makes sense the the "director" is the one using the term - since he's the farthest from the actual work, you'd expect him to be the most out of touch.

Woz and Linus are hackers, and debuggers... and some would argue artists. This guy is perhaps an artist, but no hacker.

Re:Rearranging the patterns != debugging

[SternisheFan]

Origin of the term 'debug', from wikipedia:

There is some controversy over the origin of the term "debugging".

The terms "bug" and "debugging" are both popularly attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper in the 1940s.[1] While she was working on a Mark II Computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. However the term "bug" in the meaning of technical error dates back at least to 1878 and Thomas Edison (see software bug for a full discussion), and "debugging" seems to have been used as a term in aeronautics before entering the world of computers. Indeed, in an interview Grace Hopper remarked that she was not coining the term. The moth fit the already existing terminology, so it was saved.

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for "debug" quotes the term "debugging" used in reference to airplane engine testing in a 1945 article in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society; Hopper's bug was found on September 9, 1947. The term was not adopted by computer programmers until the early 1950s. The seminal article by Gill [2] in 1951 is the earliest in-depth discussion of programming errors, but it does not use the term "bug" or "debugging". In the ACM's digital library, the term "debugging" is first used in three papers from 1952 ACM National Meetings.[3][4][5] Two of the three use the term in quotation marks. By 1963, "debugging" was a common enough term to be mentioned in passing without explanation on page 1 of the CTSS manual.[6] Kidwell's article Stalking the Elusive Computer Bug[7] discusses the etymology of "bug" and "debug" in greater detail..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging#Origin

debugging

[girlintraining]

Debugging isn't really interesting just because you do it in the air. A lot of people do that on longer flights and call that "Tuesday". On the other hand, the endless potentials for hacking this thing to display something obscene are going to be nearly irresistable to a certain kind of person. You know the type I'm talking about. (dramatic pause)

Yes, you.

Biggest project? Really...

[MindPrison]

[quote] It may be the biggest art hack ever: a project to install 25,000 individually addressable LED lights [/quote]

Uhm, have you ever seen peoples Christmas led projects? Google it, check it on youtube. There are literally roofs made as video screens with millions of leds all over the house, all individually addressable.

Re:LED module?

[hawguy]

The hardware is Bay Bridge. The Chinese knockoff will be available around Labor Day 2013.

Lights on a bridge

[tehcyder]

If that's great art, the Christmas lights at my local pub were a fucking timeless masterpiece.

Yawn - hyperbole, hype, crap

[water-and-sewer]

I dunno.

a) This isn't really 'hacking.' I find some of the stuff they do o HackaDay way more interesting than this. There, they're combining existing tools and systems in ways never before envisioned. There's real creativity there. This guy is basically doing something that's been done a lot already (every Xmas, in some towns) but on a much larger scale. Boring!

b) As an engineer, if you're debugging in front of millions of people, you F'ed up! You design your system, prototype it, test it, scale it, then build it. If you're debugging on "go day," you are a colossal failure.

c) How the hell did people decide to chip in millions of dollars for this stunt? Sure, it will look cool. But aren't there more interesting/clever uses for that kind of funding? Oh well, that's America.

Finally, I'm thinking this would be WAY more interesting if someone truly cracks into the guy's software, and on "go day," instead of the image of flags waving in the breeze, the image projected is something unspeakably horrifying.