Lucia our generative light project takes her first steps.

Lucia is a project I have had in my head for the last 2 years, and now is finally coming together.
I have always been fascinated with LED matrixes, by both the look of the matrix and by the light they emit. I find myself often staring at horrible signs with bad animations just because I like the device itself.
I think these devices are poorly used and I always wanted to get my hands on one of them to make the whole genre proud.

That's how Lucia started.

The project is about creating a lighting device we can have at home, a lighting device that will generate an atmosphere, something we would want to stare at, maybe even take the place of the TV (is that taking it too far :)

Lucia will be a standing column, about 1.2m by 0.2, with a simple interface controllable through a rotary encoder at the top.

There will be a menu system to change setting and load new generative patterns or animations. These animations will change with time but could also be affected by presence, light and sounds.

The animations are today designed and programmed in collaboration with Moka and we will hopefully see other talented coders get on board later on.

I would love to see Lucia sold at both art galleries and high end lighting stores


Technical info

24 bit
Custom 20 x 112 pixel LED matrix
P10 LED modules
Real time control by Linsn LED control card

The Linsn card takes a DVI feed from the computer and maps the first 20x112 pixels on screen to the LED matrix

The goal is to write a shell app in Open Frameworks (openframeworks.cc/) capable of loading different generative animations written with Lua (lua.org/)
There will be a user interface and the possibility controlled by buttons on the device plus the ability to control it through an iPhone.

Now that we have the LED matrix we are sourcing and designing the rest of the parts needed and designing the enclosure to contain it all.

Better videos to come
Frequent updates via twitter: tangibleint