Take this in for a moment: before Keith built our Lightshow Editor, he built the lightshows IN CODE using colors and time codification.

Our first “Lightshow Editor”

I am not an engineer, but it definitely doesn’t seem like the easiest way to build a lightshow.

Keith quickly realized that people would need a way to build the lightshows on the web if we were going to have customers. Desiring to build something user-friendly, he drew influences from familiar user interfaces like Adobe Premier and Final Cut Pro. Building a lightshow is a lot like building a movie file, or a song, so why not start there?

It took a couple months to complete, but it was an exciting time because a lot of the technology at his disposal was new (i.e. HTML5 Media API’s).

We are constantly refining and building on the editor, but what you have now is a great tool that allows you to build lightshows in time with a song. You can add effects, snap to a time signature and even augment your effects across a wide spectrum of color.

One of our favorite users, Kristian Ponsford (@iam_KP) recently filmed a demonstration of our Lighshow Editor, without any prompting from us. It is reassuring that someone could intuitively understand the software well enough to feel comfortable teaching it to other people.

Thank you Kristian for the demo!

We create large scale effects on many different phones , and unfortunately we don’t always have a huge event at our disposal to test out new features. It’s not relaxing or reasonable to debut a new effect or product at a 50,000 person event, but, we do have ways to mitigate our anxieties: namely, a lab!

Charlie tests out a top secret product in our lab!

Lab coats, goggles, gloves, boots, nose plugs, jock straps- you name it we’ve got it.

Our engineering team has built, and are constantly improving, a state of the art phone testing lab. (What makes something state of the art??)

The lab is built so that we can test fifty phones at the same time. It doesn’t sound like much, but we’re able to notice any differences, however minute, across different phone models, different versions of our software and different lightshows.

We’ll definitely give you a video tour soon, but if you’re itching to check it out… stop by our office!

It’s happened. I’ve suddenly become the guy that Louie warned about.  Connecting computers to different networks used to involve a wealth of cables and boxes, and usually a headache, but now (through what seems like magic) I can connect my computer to the Internet from almost anywhere. And it’s been a quick turn around. I expect my Internet to do so many things- lock my doors, find the nearest taco truck, make friends for me, even keep track of my dog’s hydration. Pet wearables! Anyways, I digress. Up until recently, I thought that the world ran on wifi, but boy was I wrong. Consider this your primer to ultrasonic technology.

A misconception that people have about our technology is that our app reacts to music, and another misconception is that the app needs wifi to recognize the music (through technology akin to Shazam). Our app doesn’t REALLY react to music, and it doesn’t need wifi to work.

Wham City Lights does not need wireless internet to work. It doesn’t even need a cellular data network.  Our lightshows are transmitted via ultrasonic frequencies. Sound. It’s a technology similar to wifi, but less complex. Liken it to morse code. Our lightshows are turned into teeny-tiny data files that get broadcast as ultrasonic sound. Phone microphones have a fairly sophisticated hearing range, and when they hear these high pitches noises, they convert them into the lightshows that display on your phone. You probably couldn’t hear it, but a dog might be able to.

Come on… that rules, right? In these instances where thousands and thousands of people are trying to use their phones to access information on cellular networks, networks get packed with people. We don’t use a network. We just send out a bunch of squeaks and if everyones phone’s ears (microphones) work, they access a complex and beautiful display without needing to talk to LTE or 4G or a wifi network.

Another technology that uses ultrasonic frequencies is Googles Chromecast. It pairs computers and mobile devices with TVs so that you don’t have to go through the trouble or expense of buying an HDMI cable. It’s a little bit of a mystery, but you can read more about that here. 

It seems like more and more things are possible with this technology. We’re working hard everyday to test it’s limits because we think this tech will have longevity. We promise to only use it for good. With great power comes great responsibility…

Earlier this year, Hong Kong hosted part of the international art festival, Art Basel. Around that time, Vice Media published this article– a photo essay that tries itself to digest how spectators consume art. Recksik’s photos document people taking photos of art pieces. (A little cyclical, no?) This photo essay’s deceit begs a larger question: how do smartphones change the way we digest and interact with our experiences, and do smartphones undermine the temporality of an experience?

I have noticed myself that easy access to a camera at all hours of the day diminishes my need to mindfully store information. Why memorize a name or a number, when I can just take a picture of it and peek later? Why take the time to look at a beautiful sunset when I can take a picture and look at it later, and ostensibly, forever.

At every concert I’ve been to in the last few years, I’ve noticed an increasing and, to me, troubling trend of people taking photo after photo, video after video, of the performance. It’s hard (read: impossible) to assign value to how someone enjoys a performance, but if I were on stage and the roles reversed, I think I’d be disappointed that people were trying to capture a single moment instead of submitting themselves to a larger group experience.

It would be foolish to admonish smartphones and I am by no means trying to dismiss their utility-  we just have to be smart about the way the we use them. They are incredibly powerful tools that perform a litany of incredibly important functions. Take Check for example. Check is an app that organizes all of your billing and banking information in one place so that you can take care of your bills from anywhere. It might sound kind of boring, but think about this with respect to, say, the 1950’s. Instead of keeping bills in a desk somewhere and going to the bank, post office, and “Ye Olde Bille Shoppe,” we just have to move our finger a couple times on a glowing screen that we can keep in our pocket. Wild.

We are, admittedly, a tech company. We create a product that consumers interact with in a live event setting. It’s a fine line, but our whole ethos is focused on getting audience members to engage more directly with a performance. By making them part of a spectacle, we (in a weird but powerful way) ask people to turn away from their lives inside their phones and, instead, interact with the world right in front of them.

Are we better than a smartphone camera at these events? We think so, but ultimately that is up to you to decide. (We do have camera functions plotted on our product timeline…). Wham City Lights is a powerful tool that can enhance, not hinder, a performance. Just take a look at our run on the Demi Lovato tour. We were able to engage the audience and make them part of Demi’s show. We think that’s cool and you should too!

We want to empower people and we challenge other companies to do the same. The future is daunting, but filled with the opportunity to create meaningful tools to shape our experiences. Let’s be smart and bright and weird, together!