LIMASSOL, Cyprus – Christmas displays in Cyprus and New Zealand relied upon LightFactory for control. They included tree-shaped installations at My Mall in Cyprus and the Telecom Tree in New Zealand, which changes in response to the sound of children's voices as they talk to Santa using a nearby phone booth. ArchiLX Cyprus' Christmas installation for My Mall used nearly 400 LED festoon fixtures from Glasson Electronics, which were controlled by a 64 universe LightFactory system and Ethernet to DMX boxes from Cooper Controls.
ArchiLX design director Ben M Rogers was the designer and programmer. He used 19 strands of festoon harness, each with 20 LED globes. Each LED globe offered full RGB mixing and could be individually addressed using the Glasson handheld programmer.
Because the Glasson DFS 3000 LED system transmitted power and control over just two wires, a standard festoon harness could be used. "The Glasson system is effortlessly simple in its installation and offers a dynamic and unique effect with minimal power requirements," Rogers said. "The complete LED tree installation consumes just over 800 watts of power."
The tree display, which ran 12 hours a day, featured a rapid array of colors and animations using LightFactory's matrix control system.
"I created a simple pixel matrix definition in LightFactory and then built a looping video of the colors and effects I wanted," said Rogers, who also used the built-in scheduler in LightFactory to activate and shut off the display.
"What we ended up with was a virtually zero-maintenance system which fulfilled both the creative and technical needs of the install and received acclaim from shoppers and management alike," Rogers said.
The interactive Telecom Tree in New Zealand was designed by David Eversfield and implemented by the team at opticshock using LightFactory, 1-universe Ethernet boxes and Enntec Datagates to achieve the interactivity.
People who visited the tree at a city park in Auckland or on the waterfront in Wellington could use one of the phone booths around the base to telephone Santa. The caller's voice would modulate the brightness of lights, carrying the message out of the phone booth and up the tree.
Eversfield used a Datagate with a cascading ArtNet merge to link several different interactive features into one DMX in for the grandMA console and Hippotizer controlling the tree.
Children were also invited to visit the Telecom Tree Web site, www.telecomtree.co.nz, to create their own tree design.
The interaction between the Web site and the grandMA and Hippotizer control software was made possible by LightFactory. The flexible scripting engine allowed Eversfield to send the designs directly from the Web site to the tree control software.
Martin Searancke from LightFactory implemented a number of custom variable commands to help smooth the process.
For more information, please visit www.lifact.com.
