“I just wanted to send this over to show how cool it can be even in a smaller venue. We had a little less than 1000 people show up to our Night of Worship this past weekend and the Wham City Lights was really a cool feature.” 

James, Highridge Church. 

 

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Wham City Lights is a poignant solution for schools looking to invigorate their assemblies. It’s a way to connect students to faculty, each other, and the tech world around them.

Greenwood School was looking for a way to connect to the future. Their old curriculum, resources and perspective weren’t focused on our quickly accelerating tech-centered world. They needed a way to connect with students in a meaningful way, and connect the student body to the technologically booming world around them.

“We wanted to integrate technology in our program so that the audience could interact with the District leadership. In other words…we needed the wow factor!” – Becky Somerel, Greenwood School. 

Easy Steps for Success: We set up GWD50 with a basic lightshow. They wanted to score a lightshow to Pharell’s “Happy” – the hit of the summer. The opted to have us design the show in our editor and trusted our creative intuition. We built the show for them and provided them with their Wham Waves. Once they announced to the faculty that they would be using us, we saw a significant number of downloads.

 Audience Participation:  Without some simple email and newsletter marketing, Greenwood School drove at least 565 app downloads. That is well over 50% of the attending faculty. With half of the staff participating, the show speaks for itself.

 “It was the perfect ending to our Opening of School Celebration for our District.  We have a huge push in technology this year, and this app was a great example of what you can do with technology. We would use your app again and feel sure some of our schools will be in contact with you ” 

“Technology will have a major impact on District 50 during this school year. The district has invested over 8 million dollars on upgrading infrastructure and Chromebooks to aid in the efforts of a 1:1 initiative. Friday’s Opening of School program was a chance for every employee to see the positive impact technology can have in the future.”

The Results: Wham City Lights drove 565 downloads at a 1000 person event. Our show is impressive with as little as 15-20% participation; this particular show had 56.5% participation. The show was written about in the local paper and drove over 300 views on Vine alone. The faculty loved it and the lightshow set a positive tone for the year to come.

In case you missed it, Twitch hosted a Street Fighter match that was completely regular in every way imaginable EXCEPT the players weren’t human. They were fish. How did they train the fish to play the classic game? How could such a simple-minded creature tornado kick or hadoken? How could they pull off scarlet terror?

They didn’t. (subtext: Duh). Although it is infinitely entertaining to imagine these notoriously wonky-looking fish as Street Fighter characters. Without even looking, I bet if you google “Robert the Bruce Street Fighter” you will find a number of memes.

**Upon looking I was unable to find any! Shame on you, Internet.***

The tank was divided into actions and cameras were trained on the fish. As they navigated their aquatic habitat, they would unwittingly trigger an action from the original Street Fighter controls via the camera. Since the original actions in Street Fighter are not incredibly complicated, the fight was actually quite engaging. It was also riotously funny when they would swim into the ‘up’ section and their characters would just jump up and down endlessly.

At the time that I watched, Robert the Bruce was delivering uncompromising uppercuts to poor Aquarius repeatedly, which resulted in a quick KO.

I don’t want to write a think piece (groan) on this whole phenomenon, but this is a really interesting intersection of art and technology, at least to me.

The internet and 21st century technology doodads give us incredible new tools with which to express ourselves. That’s what we try to do at Wham City Lights: if everyone has a supercomputer in their possession at a live event, why can’t we use that as a canvas?

Check out this performance we did with the Kronos Quartet. Everyone’s smartphone not only displayed color, but also added to the cacophony of sound. People didn’t bring their own instruments (for good reasons) but we synchronized light and sound to create a beautiful piece of music that couldn’t have been created without smartphones.

There are so many more ways that technology acts as a canvas and as a tool. Deep down somewhere in all of us is a desire to create art and meaning. I think the tools that we’re using on a daily basis are becoming more creative and satisfy that need. That’s all. No LARGE LOOMING IMPLICATIONS. Just a thought.

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!

Read the article below:

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/dj-dan-deacon-on-music-apps/

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!

One of our first shows in the UK at New Wine. Thanks to Kristian Ponsford for the incredible footage!

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…