Imagine adding a whole new dimension to your lighting by transforming your audience into an actual lighting fixture or even into a video surface. So in a stadium of 80,000 people you have 80,000 more lights in your rig.
Imagine performers able to trigger proximity-based lighting e?ects in the crowd: a crowd-surf could create visual e?ects that radiate outwards from the performer.
Meet the Ghostpixel, a remotely-controllable, battery-powered LED pixel, designed and manufactured by Glowmotion Technologies, available for the first time in Australia and the Asia Pacific region from Mandylights.
The Ghostpixel is the size of a box of matches and can be inserted into set pieces, stuck to the side of buildings, on floats, into inflatables, on stadium seats – the possibilities are endless. The pixels are usable by themselves for any application you can think of that requires wireless control or they can even be hardwired for more permanent installations.
Uniquely, Ghostpixels are aware of each other’s presence, using RF to talk to each other, so they can trigger flow on effects.
Mandylights has just taken delivery of their first batch of Ghostbands – a wristband that houses a Ghostpixel and, unlike the shortcomings of other simple LED bands, this wristband offers full RGB colour range, bitmapping ability, all with DMX control from any lighting console. Each band contains a bi-directional radio, antenna, microprocessor, built-in memory, and physical button. Bands can also be ?tted with RFID tokens (so they could be used as an entry ticket), and localised audio speakers.
There are four methods of control: DMX, Playback, Proximity and Interactivity.
A parade ?oat lit by Ghostpixels that can trigger proximity e?ects to Ghostbands in the surrounding areas. This allows individual ?oat colour schemes – not to mention intensity e?ects and colour chases – can be pushed out to the surrounding crowd. When not receiving information from a proximity e?ect, Ghostbands can revert to other content programmed from the lighting console.
Ghostbands are fully-recyclable with replaceable batteries that last up to 14 hours of continuous use. If you purchase Ghostbands from Mandylights for an event, and afterwards don’t require them, in most cases Mandylights will buy them back.
“There’s a massive range of applications for the Ghostpixels,” comments Richard Neville, managing director of Mandylights. “This is the first piece of technology that Mandylights has endorsed and that’s a big step for us. We’re looking at placing them onto a few of our own upcoming productions.”
Ghostpixels and Ghostbands can be programmed to react or cause any possible electronic event; they could a?ect VJ graphics, react to social media posts, light up with audio triggers or almost anything… the development team is committed to pushing the technology as far as possible.
If you’d like to attend an upcoming demo of the Ghostbands and Ghostpixels at Mandylights’ Sydney headquarters next week, please email mail@mandylights.com.
Meanwhile, check out some amazing video of Ghostpixels and Ghostbands in action on the Mandylights Facebook.
Source: media release
