Jul 27 2007
The comedy “Deck the Halls” parodied the legendary competition among neighbours in the USA to produce the most impressive and elaborate Christmas decoration.
The goal: lighting that can be seen from outer space. In the movie, Color Kinetics wrapped a house in a multimedia light show using MultiLEDs from OSRAM Opto Semiconductors and thus demonstrated quite remarkably the virtually endless possibilities of intelligent LED lighting.
The extraordinary lighting effects were achieved by using the iColor Flex SL products from Color Kinetics, a type of fairy lights fitted with LEDs (light emitting diodes) from OSRAM. Each point of light along this “string“ consists of a MultiLED with three chips in thin film technology for the colours red, green and blue. By addressing each chip individually, these LEDs can produce 64 billion colours through additive RGB colour mixing – similar to the pixels on a screen. Being quite robust, these light sources not only have a long life but are also very energy-efficient. The 14,300 LEDs that light up the movie house have a total power consumption of 7,150 watts. This roughly corresponds to four hairdryers and is around 14 times lower than the consumption of conventional fairy lights that do not provide the possibility of lighting effects. The lighting effects were implemented such as to produce festive light animations via a programmed light server which called up the motifs and controlled the LEDs. Intelligent LED lighting, however, is far more than a Hollywood gag: in architectural lighting as well as design or effect lighting and in advertising, it opens up a wealth of previously unknown possibilities.