[wordup] Das Blinken Lights

[Adam Shand]

This is great.  I  love it when people do cool stuff "just cause".

Via: Shannon <wysiwyg at alaska.com>
From: http://www.blinkenlights.de/index.en.html

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a
special present to itself and the city of Berlin. Since Sept 12, 2001,
the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building has
been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display:
Blinkenlights (a term defined by the jargon file).

The upper eight floors of the building have been transformed in to a
huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building's front windows.
A computer controls each of the lamps independently to produce a
monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations can be seen.
But there is an interactive component as well: you can play the old
arcade classic pong on the building using your mobile phone and you can
place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

Blinkenlights will be up and running at least until february 2002. Until
then, we will constantly improve its feature set. Stay tuned. For the
friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie
(QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB).
Overview

Using your mobile phone you can play Pong with Blinkenlights or your
friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own
animations allowing you to take part in our contest.

For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format
and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A
look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system.

A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting
links to other projects complete the overview.
WebCam

Those who want to have a remote view on the building can have a look at
the pictures of our webcam. Unfortunately our WaveLAN-connected cam is
not able to deliver a constant stream of pictures so you are limited to
snapshots. At least it works. You find the webcam pictures at

    http://berlin.ccc.de/~hans/cam2.jpg

The picture updates only every 30 seconds. If the WebCam does not work,
you can try the BerlinOnline WebCam as well, although it is a bit more
distant than our cam.