by Richard Cadena
What was the most interesting product at LDI this year?
That’s often the first question you get when you bump into
your friends on the trade show floor at LDI or any other industry trade show.
Everyone is looking for that one new light or video idea that, above all the
others, really blows your doors off. Everyone is certain that it’s there, but we
just haven’t found it yet. Have you seen it?
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| LDI 2016 |
LDI 2016 just ended a few days ago, and I didn’t see one
thing that amazed me, but almost everything there is truly amazing. What’s
happening on trade show floors these days is mind-blowing. Think about it. This
industry is taking miniscule diodes that emit enormous amounts of colored light
with a tolerance of a few wavelengths. Precision-cut high-tech glass or plastic
lenses gather and redirect that light through an impressive train of optics
with high-resolution treated glass or stainless-steel gobos and color filters
made with incredibly strong glass, and an assortment of effects like
precision-controlled framing shutters. The light that comes out of the fixture
is actually pulsing hundreds or thousands of times per second—so fast that
you’re brain can’t even perceive it—and those pulses are varied in width with
such precision that they can fool you into thinking that they can dim as
smoothly as the sun rises and sets. Then the whole luminaire assembly is
robotically moved with stepper motors or servomotors so accurately that they can
target a subject to within a few millimeters at a 30-meter throw. All of this
is under the control of extremely small and powerful microcomputers that are programmed
to respond to highly sophisticated consoles with hundreds of thousands of lines
of computer code that is designed to appease the whims of any user who steps up
to the keyboard. These controllers are actually spitting out pulses of voltage every
four millionth of a second, and the fixtures can not only distinguish between
these voltage pulses, but they can make sense of them and decode their intended
meaning. In some cases we’re controlling hundreds of thousands of attributes
using a single pair of copper wires, or, even more astonishing, over thin air
using wireless control. Then very creative people take dozens and dozens of
these devices and hang them on brilliantly designed aluminum structures that
can support thousands of pounds, power them using application-specific power
and data distribution systems, interconnect them and make them all work
correctly in an incredibly short amount of time, and then they make them dance
to the music of their imagination, all to the delight of anyone who happens by
the aisle. These people come from all corners of the world and they transverse
the planet in a matter of hours.
Do you really want to know what I think was the most
interesting product at LDI? All of it. Every last bit. It all boggles the mind.
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