The Best Product at LDI 2016?

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?

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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