February 11th, 2011 
admin
Reposted from Hackerspace member Liz’s blog
At halftime during this year’s Super Bowl, Daniel chatted me to ask if I was watching it because there was quite an LED show going on.
If you haven’t seen it:
Here is a summary of what I could dig up on the technology and some of my personal opinions about the visual aspects of the show.
How they did it
- almost 400 of the backup dancers wore LED-equipped costumes
- the costumes were made of durable silver tricot foil by a dance/costume company called Just for Kix in Baxter, MN
- each dancer’s costume was outfitted with 300 LED RGB strip lights supplied by Creative Lighting Solutions, LLC in Cleveland, OH… so, over 100,000 LEDs just in the dancers’ costumes
- velcro was used to affix the LED strips
- the LEDs on the dancers were set up to produce 3 colors only: red, green or white
- power was from a 12 volt battery pack with belt controller
- the dancers manually controlled their lights
- the cube-heads and the Black Eyed Peas costumes’ electronics were made by Engineering Solutions, Inc in Lehi, UT, under some direction by Creative Lighting Solutions
My opinions
- Likes:
- how the combination of the LED strips and the type of fabric in the costumes made the dancers’ entire bodies glow
- the surrealistic feel when the dancers formed moving arrows
- the cube-head dancers looked really funky – I think the combination of costumes, dancing and music were more than the sum of the parts there
- I suppose one could argue that the lights shouldn’t eclipse the singers, but in general I thought the Black Eyed Peas’ costumes could have had some more imagination as far as the LED enhancement goes – color, patterns, patterns in motion, etc. I think there is great opportunity to use all 4 dimensions and color with this fashion / lights / technology mixture.
- Choreography of the dancers forming hearts and arrows: why not combine these and have the red hearts only at first, then have one-person wide white arrows pierce the hearts… or, make the hearts appear to beat in time to the music (maybe they were supposed to look like they were beating but it looked more like swaying to me).
All in all I thought it was great to see so much wearable tech in the Super Bowl.
Posted in 
Tags: