You’ve toiled away endlessly on your holiday display, possibly risking your life — or at least a few staple gun cuts — to best your neighbors and their dancing inflatable snowmen. But you’ve done it, and now your lights are up for the whole neighborhood to enjoy.
Before you start celebrating your Christmas victory, however, take a gander at Ric Turner’s mind-blowing holiday light extravaganza. The former Disney “imagineer” has outdone his own creations from holidays’ past, and turned his house into one big, bright game of Guitar Hero he calls Christmas Light Hero. Yeah, you can’t really compete with that.
The visually stunning light show is timed and choreographed just perfectly with a very real game of Guitar Hero, as played with the Wii wireless guitar controller. Perfection didn’t come easily, though: Turner used 21,268 lights and LEDs. The end result is simply dazzling.
Christmas Light Hero
How’d He Do That?
Curious about Turner’s methodology? Here’s what Turner told Make about his out-of-the-box Christmas light configuration:
“Christmas Light Hero is using 7 light controllers from Light-O-Rama built from kits to control 21,268 lights and LEDs. Each controller has 16 outputs and 2-3 TTL level control inputs that are used by the game system to fire different programmed light sequences depending on what happens in the game. It relies on the fact that the game sequence is very consistent. If the game and the lighting sequences start together, they will stay in very good sync through the length of the song. The light program allows branching and overlays for fail, star power and ‘ready.’ I have some ideas to automate the initial show/game sync, but for now you have to push doorbell buttons at the right moments.
To program the show a video recording was made of a perfect round of Guitar Hero playing Eric Johnson’s ‘Cliffs of Dover.’ The timing of all the dots and the light show choreography follow that video.
When you play, you watch only the Christmas lights, but the audio you hear is from the Wii, so your flubs are broadcast for all to hear (people in cars can tune 99.1 and crank it up as loud as they want.) When we are not playing, a separate version of the program that has the audio from the recorded game plays with the lights as a loop. The YouTube video also has this audio, (because I forgot to record the direct audio when I was shooting the documentation, and the camcorder did not pick it up very well.)
A video screen is on the driveway showing the game video, but if you want to be on the high score list you have to make it through the whole game only watching the Christmas Lights. Even though the game is in “easy” mode, the lights don’t provide the same timing detail as the game does, so it is much harder. Even expert Guitar Hero players have a hard time with the lights, and nobody has made it through without errors (yet).”
This is perhaps the coolest holiday light show we’ve ever seen. If your dad is anything mine ��think overly competitive with holiday lights ��then this might be one viral video you might consider not passing along.
[via CNET]
Tags: christmas light hero, ric turner, viral video
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