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Massive New 'Salesforce Tower' Light Sculpture: AI, Ubuntu, Fog, and a MacBook (ieee.org)
The new tallest building on the San Francisco skyline -- and the tallest building in America west of the Mississippi -- includes a nine-story electronic sculpture that's been called the tallest piece of public art on Earth. It uses 11,000 LED bulbs reflected off the tower-topping aluminum panels -- each pixel created by a set of red, green, blue and white lights controlled by 8-bit PIC microcontrollers. "On a clear night, the show is visible for 30 miles," reports IEEE Spectrum.
Slashdot reader Tekla Perry shares their article about "the technology involved in the light show at the top of Salesforce Tower. Electrical engineer and artist Jim Campbell explains it all -- and how the window-washer problem stumped him for nearly a year." "[O]n the 62nd floor, a central PC-based computer runs Ubuntu Linux, sending instructions to a communications control system that splits the data and sends it at 11 Mbit to the 32 enclosures using a custom communications protocol... We will capture images throughout the day, sending them to Amazon's cloud, and run some algorithms designed to identify visual interesting-ness. For example, at its simplest, when we look at the sky, if it's all blue, it's boring, if it's all white, it's boring, if it has white and blue it is likely to be interesting. We'll chose the best half hour of the day at each camera, based on movement and color, to display...."
And finally, when the main display shuts down late at night, another system designed by Campbell will kick in. In this static display, a set of 36 white LEDs will create a three-dimensional constellation of lights that will look like stars. "It's quieter, it has a random aspect to it," he says.
"Since construction started, the tower has emerged as an icon of the new San Francisco -- techie, ambitious, perhaps a little grandiose," writes the New Yorker, capturing the moment when Campbell finally unveiled his four-year project -- while fighting stomach flu and a chest cold, on a night which turned out to be prohibitively foggy. The executive vice-president of Boston Properties told him cheerily, "Jim! Look on the brighter side. We've got every night for the rest of our lives."
"There was a long silence from the people on the terrace. The fog was thick. At last, someone exclaimed, 'Woo-hoo!,' and a volley of cheers followed." Although the colors they were seeing came from the celebratory fireworks and not from Jim's light sculpture.
Are there any San Francisco-area Slashdotters who want to weigh in on the Salesforce Tower?
Slashdot reader Tekla Perry shares their article about "the technology involved in the light show at the top of Salesforce Tower. Electrical engineer and artist Jim Campbell explains it all -- and how the window-washer problem stumped him for nearly a year." "[O]n the 62nd floor, a central PC-based computer runs Ubuntu Linux, sending instructions to a communications control system that splits the data and sends it at 11 Mbit to the 32 enclosures using a custom communications protocol... We will capture images throughout the day, sending them to Amazon's cloud, and run some algorithms designed to identify visual interesting-ness. For example, at its simplest, when we look at the sky, if it's all blue, it's boring, if it's all white, it's boring, if it has white and blue it is likely to be interesting. We'll chose the best half hour of the day at each camera, based on movement and color, to display...."
And finally, when the main display shuts down late at night, another system designed by Campbell will kick in. In this static display, a set of 36 white LEDs will create a three-dimensional constellation of lights that will look like stars. "It's quieter, it has a random aspect to it," he says.
"Since construction started, the tower has emerged as an icon of the new San Francisco -- techie, ambitious, perhaps a little grandiose," writes the New Yorker, capturing the moment when Campbell finally unveiled his four-year project -- while fighting stomach flu and a chest cold, on a night which turned out to be prohibitively foggy. The executive vice-president of Boston Properties told him cheerily, "Jim! Look on the brighter side. We've got every night for the rest of our lives."
"There was a long silence from the people on the terrace. The fog was thick. At last, someone exclaimed, 'Woo-hoo!,' and a volley of cheers followed." Although the colors they were seeing came from the celebratory fireworks and not from Jim's light sculpture.
Are there any San Francisco-area Slashdotters who want to weigh in on the Salesforce Tower?
I assume there’s a MacBook mentioned somewhere, but it’s certainly not in this summary. So if it’s not important enough for the summary, why put it in the title?
#DeleteChrome
It is all just middleman takeover at this point. Flaunting cash.
(even as there is only cash, no money. FRN's are debt instruments remember)
Was this built in the 90's and just brought out now? Who the fuck uses PIC any more?
I can envision the engineer now. An old white-beard in his 70's complaining about the switch to that newfangled piece of shit S/390 at work.
In 3, 2, 1...
This is SPAM.
Fuck Salesforce and the hypemachine bullshit it rode in on. The tower is uninspired despite the superfluous light sculpture spire. The unveiling was boring AF and nobody who lives in SF actually cares to date. It's no TransAmerica building.
It reminds me more and more of the split-screen shot from Soylent Green showing the stark contrast between the wealthy and impoverished boroughs. SF twiddles its thumbs with gaudy displays such as this while homelessness and drug abuse skyrockets. The bay can't reclaim it soon enough.
Giant unavoidable animated advertisements. That's the end game. Los Angeles is now also starting to install these pieces of shit. Where's a terrorist with an airplane when you need one?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I'm going to say that Salesforce is over-charging.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Screw that light pollution. The stars are much more interesting to see.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
Meanwhile at ground level, drug addicts are shooting up, defecating on the street, fighting, stealing and yelling at each other like inbred yokels.
But look up at the pretty light at the executive offices at the top, where the stench from the people below rarely reaches them. Oh if only the air over SF could handle more choppers so we don't have to deal with all the human trash and their garbage down there on the streets.
Stuff as pointless and wasteful as this is usually what we start to see just before a spectacular financial collapse. It's like the totally unnecessary designer desk chairs and massively-overpowered Sun servers of the earlier dot-com collapse.
This upcoming Silicon Valley economic collapse can't come soon enough. While it used to provide useful products and services, now so much of what Silicon Valley does is nothing more than advertising, or worse, intrusive surveillance to collect personal data for advertising purposes. Then there's the whole moz://a phenomenon, where successful products are trashed by millennial hipsters, and lots of resources are squandered on obvious failures like Firefox OS and the Rust programming language.
The computing industry, and consumers, would, in my opinion, be better off without Silicon Valley.
Can we in Europe take a moment to appreciate the application of GDPR here. The popup gives a of 10 cookies, broken up into editorial, content personalisation, and analytics, along with them a link to the privacy policy of each company.
By default only the analytics ones are ticked, and unlike many other sites which missed the point of the GDPR the site continues to function if you untick them and it doesn't appear to try and load the cookies if you don't tick the box.
The only problem really is that I don't retain cookies between sessions so it's going to come up with that popup again, next time, but at least it appears not to pay lip service while continuing to screw the users.
Wikipedia says the Wilshire Grand Center in LA is 29 feet taller than the Salesforce Tower. The article only claims, "the tallest building, floor to roof, west of the Mississippi River."
See! Nobody cares about us anymore. I cannot even be a poor white in SF anymore because only black immigrants are supposed to be at the bottom of the pile. The shame of it!
The world has gone mad when someone believes that the only people who are on skid row are people you can put in a box and lable "not like me". It is the first step in the propaganda war that leads to concentration camps and genocide as the last century clearly illustrates.
To the neon Gods they made.
of light pollution.
and, btw, get the hell off my lawn!
Absolute statements are never true
This is not the tallest west coast building, by far. Vegas' Stratosphere is quite a bit taller.
See the stars? San Francisco? There seems to be some sort of fundamental conceptual misunderstanding here.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Stuff as pointless and wasteful as this is usually what we start to see just before a spectacular financial collapse.
Check out Hong Kong, or Bejing, or Shanghai sometime - they have many things like this, and have for years. They have been fine.
This kind of stuff is not really a sign of financial excess, more a sign of how things like this are becoming cheaper and cheaper for companies to add to buildings for decoration.
Also putting up a huge display may seem expensive but there are cost savings from having a large area with no windows - cheaper heating/cooling bills for the building as a whole.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can't see stars in major cities anyway, may as well have a pretty night skyline. Many nights the sky has a constant orange glow.
When I moved to my non-major city I freaked out the first time I looked up at night from a random street with no streetlights and saw stars... it took me a few seconds to realize what they were. I don't think I'd ever noticed stars (aside from the sun) in person until that moment, which was after I could legally drink. Makes me wonder how many people have never seen them "live" in their entire life.
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
I liked the youtube clip linked. Charming and somewhat reminiscent of Blade Runner.
I currently live in Hong Kong, several skyscrapers do a bit of a lightshow and the tallest building (ICC) also features beautiful evening animations over its height, but they are monochrome.
Most local people and visitors like these animations and light shows, quite different from the soul crushing negativity one again on display here.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small.
They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck That.
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you.
They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
You'd never been out of a city your entire life, at night time?
I am local (across the bay) and I can tell you that the Salesforce Tower sticks out like a sore thumb. Arrogant egotistic overkill. I have not met anyone that likes the way it transforms the look of beautiful San Francisco. SF used to have a very strong preservationist city hall; I guess the last decade or two have seen them become hypnotized by the tech money. Too bad, that ugly thing is there to stay. And the light show ("art" ha ha) at the top is going be pouring salt on the wound. Creepy.
I had but was always curfued indoors at night, or in college and too busy doing schoolwork at night. I'd also been to northern NJ but light pollution doesn't respect political boundaries. So finally it was walking home from the bus from work that got me to look up and see the awesomeness of the true night sky.
Get cracking...
Slashdot, could you please stop posting stories which are blatant ads pretending to be something else? Thanks.
My daughter was born at (sort of) UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital. That's wonderful. Benioff's new bazillion story phallus is not. First it ruins the city skyline, and now it adds 30 miles of light pollution to an already nearly washed out night sky? A better achievement would have been blending in completely, safety notwithstanding. (SFO is just a hop away.)
The animation on the Salesforce Tower is very visible to drivers westbound on the Bay Bridge - and a huge distraction for them. This is a serious public safety issue. By contrast, the Bay Lights (set up on the bridge itself) are carefully shielded from the drivers.
It's wierd, isn't it? I grew up in a small town (~3000 ppl) and grew up looking at the sky. Then I moved 'north of 60' and was gobsmacked by the northern lights. Then I moved to the Caribbean and stared at the 'bathtub moon' ("I thought those were only in cartoons or the movies!"
Then I moved to Toronto, and missed the sky. I'd go out camping for the pure benefit of being able to see my childhood friends again.
Many of my friends had grown up in Toronto and never left. "Why would I, the city has everything I could want? If I want to see stars the internet has pictures from any telescope I could imagine." It's hard to explain the color blue to a person who has never seen.
I live in a smaller town again, and thankfully my daughter sees the stars now and never ceases to point them out. I feel like I dodged a bullet there.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
The International Commerce Centre building in Hong Kong is 1,588 feet tall (108 floors) and it has moving artsy images crawling over much of its surface every night, including areas well over the height of the Saleforce tower.
This needs some popular direct-action to remove the distracting blinkenlights. I do hope the maintenance staff and/or Salesforce developers will be kind enough to take care of deactivating this themselves, or at least leave the way open for other concerned San Franciscans to do what has to be done.
Good luck in making that abomination go away.