Engineering Solutions Goes Back to Burning Man

 

From one observer:

Holy s^&*, this is crazy. I’m glad I’m not doing any drugs right now.

From another observer:

I was in the other night on mushrooms and it wasn’t even on (it was locked up) and I had a great time. But now that it’s on, I’m not sure which one I like better!

And from the client:

Our group was working on a project for Burning Man. We had been introduced to a ‘light show’ (they call it a ‘light labyrinth’) called the Holotope some months earlier. We thought it would be a great gift to bring this light show to the participants at Burning Man. I became friends with one of the Holotope creators and he said that his team had developed, over many years, specific color sequences that greatly enhanced the visual (and neurological) effects of the Holotope. It was developed on a system that used a MIDI sequencer and was simply gorgeous. They had developed their own LED light projectors using six different LED colors in order to get the wide color gamut they needed to make the Holotope really stand out. Their system cost was several thousand dollars, which was way over the budget our group could afford.

But, not being deterred by that, we purchased the Holotope canvas print and we thought we’d try to put a standard R-G-B light projector on it. We purchased an inexpensive light projector that had a few built in sequences on it. The results were lackluster, but we realized that this idea had some potential if we could control the color sequencing. That was last year.

I managed to find John Chapman at response-box.com. I spoke with him about our needs. One of the more challenging aspects of this project was that the Holotope sequencer ran on a six channel MIDI and our R-G-B light projector ran on DMX. What the heck is DMX? And is there a way to convert MIDI to DMX? “No problem” says John, “We do it all the time.” So, with hope in hand, we engaged John on this seemingly insurmountable problem. We needed to be able to not only do a color space conversion, we needed it to be adjustable so that we could mimic the MIDI colors as closely as possible using a three color (R-G-B) projector. John obliged.

He developed a color space convertor that we could adjust with a laptop. The next challenge we had was that the MIDI developer left the country for a month, and had no access to email! Arghhh.

John to the rescue again. We sent him the MIDI files, at which point he was able to play the MIDI file, capture it and convert it to DMX. He then put those files into a memory card, and programmed their box to loop continuously on whichever file we selected.

One of the inconveniences of this system is that we suspended it from a large dome so that curious hands wouldn’t be able to get access to it; nor could we. I wasn’t fond of the idea of getting a ladder out to change programs every time we wanted to change it. John installed an IR detector so that we could stand under it and change programs with a simple TV remote control. What a blessing!

We had some great reviews of the Holotope at Burning Man last week. It’s not quite as stunning a light show as the original Holotope, but it’s about $4,000 cheaper and it’s hard for me to see the difference between the two anyway.

Thank you John for your dedication to this project. For all the hours you poured into making this a reality. For your flexibility in the changes I asked for along the way. For your creativity in finding ways to work-around limitations.

Gratefully,
Edge Dancer from Deep Heaven.

We added a custom IR receiver (with matching and visible feedback LED) on a 6′ pigtail, so that the equipment could be mounted safely out of the way.  A simple IR remote from Amazon.com let up to 10 stored files be replayed and looped, and it could easily be read from more than 12 feet away.

The DecaBox stores the original lighting data ‘raw’, all six channels of it.  The conversion from R O G Cyan B Indigo to RGB happens in real time and can be easily adjusted by the user, should a particular color balance seem off.

 

One day we’ll make it to the Playa in person. Until then, it’s been neat to work with different artists who travel there each year.
As an aside, a YouTube search for Holotope returns this example, one of several: