Empire State Building to get LEDs

[Guest pod]

Click.

Color Kinetics (you see 'em in Cameo, Ink, etc..) and Phillips are bidding.

Cool shit.

[Guest endymion]

Extremely cool.

Pod, what's going on right now with actual displays? Not just lighting. Are those flexible OLED displays getting cheaper and showing up in interior design? I've been trying to keep up but you know way more than me. I'm not so into the masked video projector thing, I'm looking forward to when there are real video displays with irregular shapes plastered all over the place.

Seen any fine art that includes video displays? Sculptures? I keep going out and looking at 'video art' exhibits but I still haven't found much in that area.

[Guest pod]

OLEDs are kind of in development hell at the moment. The biggest they can get is around 50" at the moment.

That being said, traditional LEDs are getting brighter and smaller. Go to Cameo and see the brightest LEDs on the "sticks" holding the Wizard lights up.

[Guest endymion]

I've seen some huge, very bright billboards by road sides lately. I guess they can take all kinds of weather and they're extremely visible even in bright daylight. What's up with those?

I was into the OLED displays because they're flexible. A sculptor or an interior designer paired with a graphics programmer (ahem...) could go nuts with a bunch of flexible computer screens.

[Guest pod]

According to some random Googling, Sony hopes to kick out a 27" OLED display (1920 x 1080) by the end of the year.

It's something like 5mm thick including the bezel.

So it's not dead in the water by any means. Right now, you're most likely to find OLEDs in small-format displays like phones, media players, etc.

The catch is that Kodak holds the patents to a lot of the tech.

[Guest endymion]

So what are those billboards then? They're so bright, that's something new right? LEDs?

[Guest pod]

Just new forms of LEDs. The humble LED gets brighter and smaller every couple of months. Like I said, check out the Anolis "sticks" at Cameo, they leave retinal trails like staring into a camera flash.

OLED research will continue, I think half the problem right now is the patents Kodak has.

In the Wiki entry on OLED, the author compares the patent issue to Sony's aperture grille tech for CRTs aka Trinitron. For ages, Sony Trinitron TVs and displays were the best CRTs, then the patent on aperture grille expired, and others freely put the tech in their displays, nullifying the advantage. But by then, affordable LCDs were around, so it was a short-lived 'level playing field'.

[V. Barbarino]

please copy and paste article to cj. don't have a log in.

[Guest pod]

Bugmenot, thought you sported it. ;D

[V. Barbarino]

none showed up..

[Guest pod]

Think of it as a smackdown between King Kong and Godzilla. Hours before sunrise today, two lighting behemoths faced off at the Empire State Building, vying for a $5 million contract to bring 21st century illumination to New York’s tallest skyscraper.

In the test early this morning at the Empire State Building, the existing lights, in white above, competed against L.E.D. lights from Phillips, the red light to the right, and Color Kinetics, the red light to the left.

From 3:58 a.m. to 5:09 a.m. Eastern time, the combatants projected a rainbow of colors from the 72nd floor parapet of the Empire, as its employees call the building. There were solid test-pattern blocks, vibrant stripes, spectrum cascades, strobe effects, and pattern sequences called “Fourth of July,†“New Year’s Eve†and “fireworks.â€

The two companies, Color Kinetics and Philips Electronics, had installed test lights to illuminate floors 72 to 81 at the north and south sides of the Art Deco building’s western facade.

The contest bathed the building in “intelligent illumination,†employing a new generation of computer-controlled high-brightness light-emitting diodes — or L.E.D.s — that are capable of producing millions of different colors and an infinity of patterns.

For decades, only nine colors have been available in lighting the building, deployed by six maintenance workers who braved the elements on the parapets to install — by hand — colored plastic lenses on the tops of 208 old-fashioned floodlights, a job that can take six hours. They worked the color changes 200 times a year.

And a crew changed some of those outmoded lights again and again this morning, on the north facade of the Empire State, to provide a visual comparison for the building’s managers. They were watching the test through the windows of their command center on the 28th floor of an office building at West 38th Street and Broadway.

The color of the new lights will be programmable from a computer console. The L.E.D.s will give off less heat, will last much longer, and probably will be more energy efficient than the current metal-halide lamps.

The competition demonstrates “nothing less than the digitalization of an entire major industry, replacing archaic mechanical illumination with smarter lighting,†said William Sims, president of Color Kinetics, based in Boston, which has illuminated the Hollywood Bowl, the Los Angeles International Airport and the Broadway musical “Wicked.â€

In an earlier test in January to gauge brightness and color intensity, both companies were banished from the 72nd floor parapets back to the drawing board to improve their colors, especially white. So today, “we were psyched and excited†about the test, said Govi V. Rao, general manager of Philips’s American solid-state lighting division, based in Somerset, N.J. The company has lit iconic buildings like Buckingham Palace in London and the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul.

The Empire State’s lights, normally switched on from a bit before sundown to midnight, have long observed a complex annual cycle of ritual changes: blue and white for Hanukkah, red and green for the December holiday season, yellow and white for spring, green for St. Patrick’s Day, pink and white for breast-cancer awareness. This calendar has often been punctuated by special events, as when the building went blue in honor of the passing of Frank Sinatra, Ol’ Blue Eyes.

With the new lights, though, the Empire State would be able to feature “dynamic new patterns,†said James T. Connors, the general manager of the Empire State Building Company.

The lighting upgrade is part of a years-long, $400 million refurbishment of the building that he hopes will increase its value to prospective tenants.

Mr. Connors pronounced himself “happy with the test†today, but reserved opinion on which company won, saying that won’t be decided until the companies submit their formal bids for the job. Installation could begin as early as next fall, for a debut in 2008.

The new lighting systems have one serious shortcoming, however. The L.E.D.s will be projecting light onto the building, not densely covering its sides and projecting outward, as they would on Times Square billboard screens — “so you can’t,†Mr. Connors said, “create an image of King Kong with these lights.â€

[Guest endymion]

none showed up..

Hey that's contributory infringement.

[all4tribal1414779019]

I've seen some huge, very bright billboards by road sides lately. I guess they can take all kinds of weather and they're extremely visible even in bright daylight. What's up with those?

There's a big road side LED display off 95 and i believe hallandale blvd or so, you can see it if you are traveling south on 95.

The further you are from the LED display the brighter it will get. For instance a business unit that measures 6 inches by 40 inches can be seen up to 200 ft or more away in bright daylight where something larger like a 12 inches by 50 inches display unit can reach over 1000 ft in distance depending on the font and letter size that the unit box will let you do. Most of them are outside LED's so they can take just about any type of weather beating. Im talking about just the amber color not the multiple light patterns used with the Empire State Building's OLEDs.

They're so bright you can see them thru tinted glass.

LED's will also stand up to 100,000 hours where OLED's average 20,000-40,000 hours at the moment.

OLED's are deff neat, just highly costly to be used towards marketing/advertising purposes or in form of art. I know in the case of Empire state building they were projecting lots of different light patterns.

[Guest endymion]

There are all of these references from 2004 all about how flexible displays were right around the corner. It's 2007 now, what happened.

[Guest pod]

The further you are from the LED display the brighter it will get.

Not true, that violates the inverse square law.

;D

[Guest JMT]

with that sign on 95, i think it has to do with the viewing angle as you get closer.

[Guest pod]

Ryan, here's an example of the LED I posted about earlier. The room is lit up only with the LEDs at this moment.