Fibredisplay
The concept
Projector LCD display firing colored lights down fibres to create a non-square, non-homogeneous video or visual display
Background
The basic idea developed from Paul wanting to have a textured surface of lights which people could illuminate, in order to draw whatever they wanted. We got to wondering how you would easily create a whole load (like hundreds or thousands) of independently controllable lights
Implementation
We worked up the idea of using fibre effectively stuck on the front of a screen. It’s relatively easy to describe a control behaviour to set the color of pixels on a screen (you can play a video, or write a processing script, or run an itunes visualiser or whatever).
Then you just use light-pipes - fibres - to take the color from your chosen pixel, to the location you want the light to be.
I’ve got a fibre-optic lamp which we played with a bit, sticking grapes on the end of the fibres as diffusers to establish how we would get a nicer effect than the directed points of light coming out of the end of the fibre itself.
Since then, I’ve been blogging a bit about the projector kits you can buy which would be a basic mechanism to implement this.
Open questions
In the end we need to choose some kind of display surface or configuration, once we’ve built the fibre display itself. Tiling boiled sweets into a sort of organic mountain structure seemed like fun, but we’re still brainstorming exactly what the options are. The other fun prospect was just having them hanging down, and when idle, they would project a picture on the floor, but when you walk through, you would disturb it in interesting ways.
I suspect it will turn out different in the end. Still in the works.
An existing experiment of this kind? The linked page lists materials and performance features.
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