Interactive Lighting
Last updated
Last updated
Add interactive lighting to any art installation or space, whether to drive home an important message, set the mood for a party, or just add some beauty. To start, we are going to show some basic interactions you can set up, and then we will explain how to extend them to more complicated projects.
Our first interaction will be to turn a light on and off with a button. This is fairly simple, but you will see how everything builds on top of this.
The next step is to build an equation that matches the logic shown here:
To do so, first add a "when" statement by tapping the blue plus button and choosing logic. Tap "when this happens."
To add our "button is pressed" statement, tap "this happens" in the sentence, choose button, and tap "pressed."
Next, let's set our glow module to a color. Tap "do this" in the sentence, choose glow, tap the glow mode icon (color palette) and drag the hue slider to a color of your choosing.
To turn the glow module off when the button is not pressed, repeat the steps above except this time choosing "not pressed" for the button's state and sliding the brightness slider to off.
After the equation has been created it needs to be cast onto a Device. Tap the cast button in the bottom right hand corner and follow through the cast process steps.
You now have the basics of creating an interactive lighting set up. Instead of a button this could be swapped out with a distance or force sensor so that when someone is close to an exhibit or stepping on a specific surface you activate a lighting interaction.
Now that we have an LED turned off and on, let's take it up and notch and have the color be set by a proximity module.
By having individual properties be controlled by separate modules you can create collaborative art pieces. For example, imagine an escape room where one person has to hold down an object while another person has turn a switch to light up a clue.
The glow editor has a lot of features packed into it. All pattern's individual properties can be controlled by different modules. For example, at the Innovator's House at the Sundance Film Festival, an interactive red carpet was built with IF Magic and a glow pattern. As visitors walked down a red carpet a distance sensor measured their position and used it to set the position of a glowing dot on a LED strip.
Using everything demonstrated above, you can do the same. All you have to do is under glow choose "dot" and set position to a distance module.
The glow module is great for running tests, but six LED pixels can be small for installations. You can use the same equation and instead swap out a glow module with an LED strip and update the number of LEDs. To learn more, read on in the Glow Output & Lighting page.
As you can see there is a lot you can do with just a few modules and LEDs. For example an NYCxDesign award-winning architectural installation at the Flatiron Plaza in NYC used six Devices with distance sensors and glow strips to create an interactive installation which reacted with different patterns depending on how people moved through the structure.
