Interhacktive

Architech Rezan Prananta contacted me about making a musical staircase since he had seen a viral video of the Musical Staircase I made for SparkFun Electronic's lobby. His request was to make it more appealing to take the stairs than the elevator by using light and sound to illustrate a story as people progress up the stairs. This project was for a building that had not yet been built so we were able to adjust the staircase and elevator location as well as get local community feedback about the concept and storyline that was the core theme of the audio and visuals. We chose The Chocolate Tree, a Mayan folktale, which culturally represented the community and built all our sounds and visuals based on various aspects of the story.

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The lamp design was based off Mayan symbols and custom fabricated in Portland, OR. There were 120 lamps in the Mariposa Chandelier and each had 13 individually controllable LEDs that emit light into the edge of the acrylic so light could flow through each lamp and up the 12 strands. We originally installed motion sensing in the handrail to improve the longevity of the permanent installation but after some user testing we decided to use elevator buttons with embedded ring lights to make it more obvious to people visiting the building that the chandelier is interactable. Lots of tuning of the audio also took place once on site because of the reverberations in the stairwell and the multi-channel audio system needed a bit more blending.

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At the time this project was the largest I had taken on to manage and quickly realized I would need a lot of help if I wanted to complete it in the time and budget required, so I worked with numerous fabricators to physically build the installation and got additional support with software and audio.

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While working at Sparkfun Electronics, CEO Nathan Seidle asked if I wanted to prototype some light up dance suits for a startup in NYC. I was eager to apply my hardware prototyping skills and quickly made some Electro-Luminescent suits that could be controlled via WiFi in Processing, each suit had an ID and each EL wire strand was addressable from the controller application so choreographable routines could be sent to the suits from the host computer. Each suit had 8 addressable light strands that could be a variety of colors in the original prototypes. I sent the electronics off to NYC where they sewed all the electronics into some black suits and started playing with the concept and showing it off to investors to gather funding. Shortly after the light up dance suits would be featured on America's Got Talent and updated versions were worn by the Black Eyed Peas, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Depth Cab for Cutie, and much later on the company had a NYC show and a Las Vegas show.

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This video shows the evolution of the suits over the years, for clarity I made the original prototypes that helped the company launch while Miral Kotb and the iLuminate team continue to refine and expand upon the original designs and are still putting on amazing performances around the world 10+ years later.

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