December 14, 2009

Mind Blowing Monday: Christmas Lights Display Lets You Rock Out to Guitar Hero


Yesterday at church I spoke about how the original intention behind Christmas lights were to remind us that Jesus was born as a light in a dark world. I don't think this quite has the same reminder but it is stinking cool.

Here is the full story from 1up.com

People can tend to get carried away with Christmas light decorations, but this is something else. In the clip above, you can see the home of former Disney Imagineer and special effects specialist Ric Turner, which he decked out himself for the holiday. And it appears he's also a Guitar Hero fan, because his house actually lets you play the game by following the lights on his garage door.

Turner offered up a detailed explanation of how exactly he built this wonderment to Make Online (via Kotaku), which involved 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."

And for those of us who barely understood that, here's a more digestible explanation of how this work: "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)," Turner explained. "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."

Okay, so 1) you can only play Eric Johnson's Cliffs of Dover from Guitar Hero III. And 2) it looks like it only works on the Easy setting, using only the first three fret buttons. And even still, this has to be the coolest frickin' thing we ever saw.

Posted via web from matt mckee

blog comments powered by Disqus
 

Copyright 2009 All Rights Reserved Revolution Two Church theme by Brian Gardner | Blogger template converted & enhanced by eBlog Templates