Project Blinkenlights - A Building-Sized Light Display On Your iPhone

1:19 pm, October 2nd, 2008, Lonnie Lazar

Thanks to an iPhone app called Stereoscope, iPhone users will be able watch a giant interactive art show played across the façade of Toronto’s City Hall buildings this week.

A free download, Stereoscope is an amazingly fluid 3D rendering of the Toronto City Hall’s two curved, opposing façades. With your fingers, you can zoom in and out and move around the giant buildings, Matrix-style, on your iPhone’s screen.

And starting October 4th, the Stereoscope app will replay a live light show playing across the surfaces of each building, generated using lights in the buildins’ 960 windows. The Stereoscope app will stream the light show live, replaying it on the rendering of the buildings.

“Reaction to the iPhone application has been overwhelmingly good as many people were surprised what 3D on the iPhone could be like,” said project director Tim Pritlove.

The light show is part of an all-night art event called Nuit Blanche that will turn the landmark buildings into a giant computer screen.

Created by Project Blinkenlights, the unique art show will feature animations and interactive games.

The full story after the jump.

Building on past exhibitions in Berlin and Paris, Project Blinkenlights has developed new technology to wirelessly control lights placed behind the windows of the Toronto City Hall building, allowing for a large-scale visual concert. The team recently did a calibration test of the Toronto installation and it looks like it’s going to be pretty cool.

The public is invited to be a part of the installation using the creative tools and the Stereoscope iPhone app, according to Pritlove, who said, “we are opening [the website] for submissions today or tomorrow.”

The project’s Stereoscope simulator went live on the iTunes AppStore this week, providing an excellent example of 3D rendering on the iPhone and a preview of what Stereoscope will look like in Toronto.

Pritlove told Cult of Mac, “Interactivity will be open to all mobile phones just by dialing a certain number that will activate a game on [the iPhone's] screen.” The phone number will be posted to the Blinkenlights web site prior to the Nuit Blanche event.

The project also includes Stereoscope creation tools that allow Mac users to create beautiful animations that can be sent to the simulator program, converted to Blinkenlights Movies format and submitted for playback on the Stereoscope installation in Toronto.

Created by the Chaos Comupter Club in Berlin, the first Blinkenlights project brought the famous Haus des Lehrers building in Alexanderplatz to life for over 23 weeks between September 11, 2001 and February 23, 2002, as thousands of people played Pong, spelled out love letters and sent artworks in light across its distinctive facade.

The name “Blinkenlights” is part of hacker history. If you look it up in the Jargon File, you’ll find it defined as “front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer”. The original wording derives from a funny sign computer people liked to put on the door of the rooms housing their technical equipment, which said, basically, “Don’t touch anything, just enjoy the blinking lights.”

Blinkenlights was back, in Paris, on September 25th, 2002 running eleven nights until the official Nuit Blanche happening on October 5th/6th. The installation, titled Arcade, presented an ever-changing kaleidoscope of animations and interactive applications on the facade of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Arcade promoted a new series of classic computer games to run on the building, allowing people to play games on the building’s face. Among others, the all-time favorite pixel puzzle game Tetris could be played using nothing but a mobile phone.

With its newly designed light control technology, the Blinkenlights team was able to smoothly dim the brightness of each pixel, sending sophisticated, large-scale animations glowing into the Paris night.

Check out the short documentary videos of the Berlin Blinkenlights and the Paris Arcade linked below, or download hi-res versions of longer clips here and here.

Posted by Lonnie Lazar in Media, News, iPhone | Comment on this article