Launched back in November 2009, Christie is selling an innovative back-lit display system called MicroTiles that combine DLP + LED technologies in a unitized 12″ high x 16″ wide x 10″ deep block.
Author Archive for bkoerner
01
Jul
10
christie’s microtiles
30
Jun
10
foscarini’s digital tunnel
I just picked this up from Foscarini’s website: As part of their “Inside” installation for Milan Design Week back in April, Foscarini created a tunnel with digital projections on the walls and ceiling. Check out the videos on their site.
It is difficult to pick out the actual projector locations from the images and video on the site, but I did notice in the video that the tunnel was visible from both the inside and the outside. If you imagine a future with transparent OLED screens, this is how architectural spaces may look. In the image below you can see the partial area of transparency:
This a great quote, nicknamed “The Shirky Principal,” attributed to Clay Shirky.
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
If lighting reps (or better yet, the actual manufacturers) simply posted lighting costs and markups openly, poof…no more reps.
If lighting manufacturers simply took money directly from…OMG…the actual customer, there would be no more need for wholesale distributors.
The NY Times has a piece on the resurgance in popularity over the past decade of Ye Olde Filament Bulb.
I especially love that the conclusion of the article is to use candles! I often remind people that LED hotshot Color Kinetics, right before being acquired by Philips for $700m+, made only $65m in revenue, while Yankee Candle Co. makes well over $600m a year in revenue.
People would still be buring whale oil to light their homes if it wasn’t illegal…
07
Jun
10
Flexible OLED screens: for real
Ecouterre posted a very interesting piece on Sony’s development efforts for flexible OLED. Such “wearable” concepts for OLED screens have, frankly, been around forever and are getting quite tired, but what is notable is the embedded video finally showing an actual, flexible thin-film video screen in operation.
26
Mar
10
hp lobby installation
Designboom has posted yet another rockin’ lighting installation, this time at HP’s Palo Alto office lobby. Designed by installation artists Tronic, a series of vertical video panels include sculptural back panels, and each panel automatically rotates to add a kinetic dimension to the design.
Oh yah…all digital video upfront…nothin’ but curves in the back.
Yet another sculpture + projection installation: Designboom has a post on installation called “Morphology“, which employs simple white cubes as projection surfaces. Melbourne artist Kit Webster projects extraordinary digital kaleidoscope effects on the cubes, some of which really distort visual space perspective in amazing ways.
The video is a trippy delight…
Core77 posted an installation called “Augmented Sculpture” by German artists Grosse8 and Lichtfront.
Consisting of an angular wooden sculpture surrounded by four precisely registered video projectors, Lichtfront seamlessly projects a dazzling sequence of patterns onto the sculpture.
These guys should get T-shirts made up that say: “Trigonometry rocks my world!”
I found this older post on Design Boom: Sculptor Olafur Eliasson from Copenhagen created an interesting configurable geometric system prototype for sculptural pendant fixtures.
05
Mar
10
draw the lights
Yanko Design posted a nice concept by designer Seo Dong-Hun for an adjustable ceiling lighting system with individually remote-controlled LED pixels. Completely doable with current technology…just cost prohibitive.
04
Mar
10
electroland
Electroland is a Los Angeles firm that focuses on interactive lighting installations for public spaces.
SEED Magazine has an interesting piece on bioluminescent organisms.
One paragraph in particular reads like Mother Nature’s version of interactive lighting control:
“Their lights have a variety of purposes: Camouflage, attracting mates, attracting (or distracting) prey have all been observed. In animals with nervous systems, in most cases, neural activity initiates the bioluminescence. But in the velvet belly lantern shark, Lynn says, researchers found that the glowing was not caused by nerve cells. Instead, it seemed, certain hormones controlled the glow: Melatonin and prolactin turned it on, and a hormone called Alpha-MSH turned it off. This makes some sense, as melatonin is activated by darkness (it helps control sleeping behavior in humans). This species of shark uses glowing as a form of camouflage.”
29
Jan
10
ipad concept wall
Australian architects ClarkeHopkinsClarke have generated a fun concept rendering for an “interactive library wall” made out of iPads. The concept as literally expressed is impractical, but the idea is clearly supporting a trend for future architectural systems: A unitized, tiled, interactive media wall, that is at once controlled as a homogenous unit or as individual zones of interactivity. Reminds me of my MArch thesis, way back from 2000.
via Gizmodo
12
Jan
10
simple wooden pendants
Adam Brackney is a designer in Minneapolis with a small storefront called Workerman. He has for sale a refreshingly simple pendant: A walnut block, Edison socket, and retro carbon-filament incandescent A-lamp. Ahhhh….the good old days.
Incandescence: We Salute You!
via NotCot.org
Jason Brooks is a London-based graphic illustrator that has done work with numerous companies across the genres of fashion, lifestyle, and interiors. Besides making me wish I was a young, rich and fabulous hipster-globe-trotting-party-animal, his illustrations are fantastic lighting inspiration: They just ooze luminosity and sparkle from every pixel.
Oh yah…time to brush up on my Photoshop/Illustrator skills!
05
Jan
10
dubai fountain
WET Design, the designers and fabricators of the most bad-ass fountains ever, have a snazzy new full-screen Flash website that includes a new video of the Dubai Fountain.
6,600 submerged lights, 25 color projectors, hundreds of submerged robotically-controlled nozzles and enough compressed air to at once blow 22,000 gallons of water as high as 500 feet sure do make for an impressive video.
05
Jan
10
Luminous Ceilings
Here’s a fantastic slide show of illuminated ceilings throughout history. Modern-era projects start at about 2:30 into the video.
“The aesthetic of luminous ceilings: From the image of heaven to dynamic light.”
By Thomas Schielke, via Arch Daily.
Editor’s Note: You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything in the past month. This is because I took an exciting new job and my family and I moved across country. Needless to say, I’ve had zero time for blogging.
My new position is Senior Marketing Manager – LED Systems at Micron Technologies. Never heard of Micron? Don’t worry…if you are in the lighting industry, I’m sure you will in the next year. Micron is a huge manufacturer of memory chips and other semiconductor products, and is launching a new line of LED products.
But more on that later. For now, check out the article I wrote as my “swan song” for Lam Partners, considering future trends in lighting:
“Less Or Else” is Becoming a Bore
Happy Holidays!
19
Oct
09
la rinascente – top floor
Ooohhh….aaaahhh….Italians have such style. While we Americans get to shop under acres of the cheapest 2×4 acoustic ceiling tiles that our department stores can procure from the lowest bidder, the department store La Rinascente in Milan is a showpiece of design.
ArchDaily has a great piece on the new top floor snack shop/restaurant, equipped with gorgeous translucent panels backlit either naturally by skylights above or fluorescent lighting at night.
Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas recently unveiled a massive 18′ wide by 4′ tall rear-projection, multi-touch, multi-user interactive wall for showcasing its rock’n'roll memorabilia collection. Developed by Obscura Digital, a San Fransisco-based “digital design and technology marketing agency,” the wall uses three 1920 pixel HD projectors along with some serious graphics processing power to render a huge number of images and video clips with live multi-touch manipulation.
Continue reading ‘hard rock cafe interactive memorabilia wall’
