Hello, Live Design Online readers, I'm Jim from Jim On Light. Thanks for having me!
I was reading through the Live Design Online blog and Marian's post about the Laser Street Signals inspired me to report about a few other light and road/driving related devices that I found recently. I was going to write my first post about how fun it is to have a friend named "Crazy Pete" while touring with a production full of zebras and anteaters that only eat cheese curls and drink beer, but I figured I'd save that for another day! Since I'm a lighting designer and general light nerd, I thought it might be appropriate to share some interesting devices that are in the works - in some way or another. I'm finding the more I write on my blog about all of the lighting industries, the more ideas I get for the Entertainment lighting industry.
There's an amazing amount of devices right now that are based on a need in the Civil and Infrastructure lighting worlds - from solar powered streetlamp sources (there's about eleventy thousand of these right now) to LED devices that help light up the roadway, to a signal system I just saw in Southwestern Colorado while driving to Durango - a "Wildlife Detected" LED sign with a bunch of sensors and radar or something that detects "wildlife." Go technology, right?
Check out these two systems: The Light Lane and the Luna Road Lights.
Luna Road Lights and the Light Lane seem like two perfectly good solutions to two perfectly long time problems - how do we keep drivers on the road at night, and how do we keep drivers from plowing into bicyclists? The Luna Road Lights are a reality right now, available for purchase and installation; the Light Lane is still in a conceptual phase the last time I checked.
The Luna Road system is LED; it's got a high load capacity so that your little Honda Civic won't crush them; they're also powered by the biggest light source in our world - no, not a Syncrolite, the Sun! After charging for eight hours the Luna Road LEDs burn for an easy 12 hours, or so I'm told, and are darkness-sensitive. This seems like a pretty interesting solution to this perceived problem - I'd be interested in seeing how they do when it's raining cats and dogs somewhere like Dallas, TX during a storm - or in northeast Minnesota when the road is covered with ice.
The other system, unfortunately still in the birth and conceptual stages is the Light Lane by a firm called Altitude. Light Lane is a laser system that defines the cycle lane (in theory) for the cyclist from the cyclist, and is supposed to keep the drivers in-the-know about the cyclists and their space. It's true that not all streets have bike lanes, and they're expensive to make - so Light Lane makes the bike lane wherever the bike goes.
Who's going to make a laser that shines on the cars with drivers text messaging while driving?