The Light Within, 2023

The Light Within, 2023

The goal of our piece, “The Light Within”, is to inspire viewers to experience a renewal of their own self. The public is invited to stand in front of the exhibition, facing the camera located at the top of the ping-pong wall. The camera captures the viewer in live-time and projects their image onto 1764 lit up ping-pong balls, creating an intricate matrix of colour and lights. There is also a control panel with two dials that allow the user to adjust and experiment with the light projection. One dial adjusts the noise of the image, while the other changes the colour. By doing so, the viewer not only interacts with the art piece, but they also become transformed as a part of it. “The Light Within” reclaims the function of the mirror and encourages the viewer to confront their reflection in order to see the beauty of their inner light.

Contributors:
Construction: Ludwig Wilhelm Wall
Software: Charlie Wang (BCompSc 2019), Joseph Kinsella (BASc Mechanical Engineering 2015), Brian Le (BASc Computer Engineering), Richard Shi (BASc Computer Engineering 2020), WLED community
Installation: Abdallah Arar, Sabrina Lopresti, Yisan Jun, Hanwei Ng, Nick Olsen, Easty Guo and Kevin Tran

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About the process:

Design:

We started with preliminary renders and custom electrical plans to implement the project. The show took place from March-May, therefore we had to consider changing weather conditions into the structure. Ontario Place is located right beside the lake, therefore objects would experience a lot of wind and cold. The design needed to be able to withstand this and not pose as a safety hazard to visitors (ie. tipping hazard).
We decided to use Ping-Pong balls for our display because they are excellent at diffusing light. Rendering a reflection as a series of circular forms is also a nod to a technique called “Ben-Day dots”-found in comic books and pop art.

Implementation:

Ludwig W. Wall designed an intricate wooden structure consisting of laser cut boxes, which are designed to house the LED lights. Each box has holes which LED lights can be stitched through. The boxes are then stacked into a large wooden frame to create a giant screen. The support structure that Ludwig fabricated is designed to withstand the elements. Because Cold, wind and high traffic were major design considerations.

All LED strips have to be soldered together and meticulously waterproofed. For the 1764 LEDs in the project, this represents over 3000 separate wires to solder and heat shrink. Nathan re-wired commercial electric wheelchair parts (which was opted to use for its weather proofing abilities) using a custom built RC Low Pass circuit to convert a PWM signal.

A large point of difficulty was in getting all the image processing and LED driving to run on a Raspberry Pi 3, eventually this was resolved by finding a camera that could automatically downsample the outputted resolution. Razer generously gifted us a webcam that could do so.

In order to get the the images from the webcam to be translated into a pixelated LED projection, many CS and engineering students-all from the University of Waterloo helped us write the code. The main contributors to the code are Daniel Pechersky (BCompSc 2022), Charlie Wang (BCompSc 2019), Joesph Kinsella (B.A.Sc Mech Eng 2015) Brian Le (B.A.Sc Comp Eng 2020), Richard Shi (B.A.Sc Comp Eng 2020) and Nathan Fischer (B.A CHPH 2023).

You can read the code on Daniels repository here: https://github.com/DanielPechersky/wonderwall

Finally, 1764 ping pong balls are individually drilled and glued onto the LED wood wall. Many hours and hot glue burns later, the wall is complete!