Browser-Controlled Lighting Engine...

Hey folks. We hit another milestone moving towards our upcoming installation at SXSW this March in Austin, TX! In this case, we accomplished browser-based control and feedback of the light engine that will drive our light sculpture. This is an important architectural piece of our final design, since our participants will be interacting with the engine through a browser. Now that we can control, and provide feedback from the engine with this test app, we simply have to use it as a guide and install the same hooks into our final user web-app. Bdbdbd.

There are controls to set the lighting 'preset,' which is just a set of individual lighting 'designs' (simple patterns). Or, for even more fun, you can add a preset's lighting designs to the currenly active ones -- enabling many cool layered effects. The video is long, because I was having so much fun playing with it. It is somewhat mesmerizing! Then again I haven't slept yet and its 6:40am, so right now I'm finding a lot of things pretty mesmerizing.

Browser-Controlled 'Virtual' SpinXSW Sculpture

For the techies out there: here's how we did it...

The movie shows a test client web app, connected by web-socket to a node.js server. The server is communicating to its own copy of the C++ light engine, which is wrapped in a node.js plugin (called an 'addon' in node.js-speak). Every time the browser page is ready for a refresh, it asks the server to compute the next round of lights. When complete, the server sends the light colors/positions back to the browser where it is drawn on the next animation update cycle. So basically, exciting times for your inner nerd, and nice visuals for everyone else!