MUSKEGON — Expect the unexpected with this year’s Summer Celebration Fourth of July fireworks.

A new company, American Fireworks of Ohio, is doing them and the company has its own term for what will be lighting up the sky (and Muskegon Lake) — a pyro-musical.

“It’s something that will be really amazing,” [...]]]>

MUSKEGON — Expect the unexpected with this year’s Summer Celebration Fourth of July fireworks.

A new company, American Fireworks of Ohio, is doing them and the company has its own term for what will be lighting up the sky (and Muskegon Lake) — a pyro-musical.

“It’s something that will be really amazing,” said Brian Teeling, lead pyro-technician for Muskegon’s show. “People will go away with their jaws dropping. They’ll go away saying they can’t wait to see it again next year.”

The fireworks will begin after the final of tonight’s three musical acts, which typically is about 10:20 p.m. The concerts begin at 6 p.m. with Jimmy Buffett tribute band Live Bait and will be followed by Kalamazoo’s Matt Giraud of “American Idol” jazz fame. Tribute band Echoes of Pink Floyd takes the stage at 9 p.m. for a concert and laser-light show.

Concert-goers will get to see all the concerts and the fireworks for $20 from the Heritage Landing venue. However, those wanting to view the fireworks only from inside the concert grounds also must pay the $20.

Roberto Sorgi, owner of American Fireworks, said the 28-minute show will be choreographed to 30 songs, including tunes from Beyonce, Jimmy Buffett, Kiss and ZZ Top.

The fireworks will be launched from a barge in Muskegon Lake.

“It will feature products never seen before in Muskegon, such as 3-D effects, which will be neat,” Sorgi said. “We will always have something going on, from water to sky.”

This includes a shell that explodes in the water. “There’s a product that shoots into the water and burns on the water,” Teeling said.

That might sound dangerous, but Teeling said it isn’t.

“A computer fires the entire show,” he said. “Nobody is near the product the entire show. … This is as state-of-the-art as you can possibly get with fireworks.”

There’s also a safety perimeter of about 800 feet around the barge where no boats are permitted.

In addition, it’s not something you throw together in a couple of days.

“We’ve spent over a week on the Muskegon show — a week for 28 minutes,” Sorgi said.

The company has about 100 displays of various sizes going on over the Fourth of July weekend. Joe Austin, Summer Celebration’s executive director, said that budget-wise, Muskegon is in the top 15 shows the company’s putting on.

While Austin didn’t reveal how much the display costs, it is believed to be in the $40,000-$50,000 range.

Source : mlive.com

Mike Gould has a very unique passion: playing with lasers. As a member of [...]]]> Editor’s note: University of Michigan junior Ellora Gupta is writing a regular summer series called “Passionate People.” Her goal is to inspire others and her column will cover uplifting stories about Ann Arbor locals who are striving to achieve their goals and passions.

Mike Gould has a very unique passion: playing with lasers. As a member of Illuminatus 2.1, he puts together laser shows.

“Illuminatus 2.1, a laser light show, is the driving creative force for my life,” Gould said.

The history of Illuminatus stretches back to 1972 when Gould began constructing laser devices as a hobby with partner Wayne Gillis. Gould calls this period of time “Illuminatus 1.0,” during which they performed very basic light shows using one laser.

“We did light shows up through the 70s,” he said. “It kind of petered out because, really, the only place you could do light shows was in discos, and we were not into disco.”

During the 80s and 90s, however, Gould found it difficult to popularize the lasers.

It was not until 2009 that Gould resumed his activity with the laser light shows. He was asked to perform at Penguicon, an open source software convention. This was the beginning of Illuminatus 2.0, during which he built the first generation of laser lunchboxes: laser devices that had been embedded into metal lunchboxes and could be projected out from within.

“We had to put (the lasers) into a metal box for protection,” Gould explained. “In searching for cheap metal boxes, this idea came to me. So we found a bunch of lunchboxes on eBay. They were just the right size to hold a device.”

Gould said that unique idea was what got the ball rolling for him and his team. After writing an article for Make magazine about his lunchbox lasers, he was sponsored by eBay to attend Pop Tech, a technology conference in Maine. There, he demonstrated his laser show.

“We thought it was pretty hard to aim a lunchbox,” he admitted. “We decided they were too hard to use in performance so I thought about what light source can you aim. Obviously stage lights came to mind so we started building up these antique stage lights.”

This was the beginning of Illuminatus 2.1, Gould’s current project. Working with partners David Bloom, Wayne Gillis and Steve Rich, he prepares music and psychedelic imagery for the laser lights shows. He then projects these images and aims the lasers on the walls and ceilings of the venue to create a light show with music.

“It is our goal to have much more control over what the lasers are projecting such that we can have a closer integration between the musical aspects and the visual aspects of the show,” he explained.

From childhood, Gould was fascinated with building technology.

“When I was five years old, I got a crystal radio kit,” he recalled. “So I built a crystal radio and all of a sudden I could listen to a radio.”

This passion continued throughout high school where he built audio and electronic devices, as well as an entire recording studio. Later, he attended Kalamazoo College and majored in biology. After graduation, he worked at the University of Michigan as a Macintosh computer expert. He retired from that job to pursue his passions with lasers and other interests.

Currently Gould is working on a marketable laser lunchbox. He has a shop in his garage where he has learned to cut, drill and polish aluminum for portable lasers that he and the team are looking to sell.

“It’s the lava lamp of the 21st century,” he said.

Gould said that he and the team have been receiving more publicity about their shows and lasers. He hopes that in the future, he could connect with other laser enthusiasts and make Illuminatus more popular to people.

“I’d like to have a big laser light show where everything is controllable and has artistic merit,” he said. “After all, the motto of the laser light show is ‘lux plus esto’ which is Latin for ‘let there be more light.’”

Ellora Gupta is a junior at the University of Michigan with a strong interest in passionate people. If you want to share your passions or the passions of others, please contact her at egupta@umich.edu.

Source :  annarbor.com

Location:  Memorial Lawn

Stone Mountain park honors our troops and their families, in a three-day celebration of American spirit at Atlanta’s largest Memorial Day Weekend celebration.

Enjoy the park with an all-attractions Adventure Pass which will provide entry to all Stone Mountain Park attractions including Sky Hike, one of the nation’s largest adventure courses set high [...]]]> Dates:  May 29-31, 2010

Location:  Memorial Lawn

Stone Mountain park honors our troops and their families, in a three-day celebration of American spirit at Atlanta’s largest Memorial Day Weekend celebration.

Enjoy the park with an all-attractions Adventure Pass which will provide entry to all Stone Mountain Park attractions including Sky Hike, one of the nation’s largest adventure courses set high in the tree tops. Get your heart racing in a thrilling Journey to the Center of the Earth 4D Adventure located in Crossroads®. For an unprecedented view of the Atlanta Skyline, hop aboard the Summit Skyride. And of course, your family is sure to enjoy the Scenic Railroad, Mini-Golf, the Great Barn and more! Ask about adding a Ride the Ducks™ tour to your Adventure Pass for only $8 (plus tax).

Plus, join Stone Mountain Park as we salute our troops during the Lasershow Spectacular with a special fireworks finale. Marvel as the skies above light up in a specially choreographed musical tribute honoring the brave men and women who protect our country. The special fireworks display can be seen Saturday, Sunday and Monday of Memorial Weekend after the regular Lasershow Spectacular.

Save even more for your family members when you pre-purchase your tickets at the following bases:

Dobbins Air Reserve Base – Marietta, GA 
Fort McPherson – Atlanta, GA 
Fort Rucker ITT - Dale County, AL  
Kings Bay MWR ITT- Kings Bay, GA  
MCCS MWR ITT – Albany, GA
Robins Air Force Base – Warner Robins, GA 
Maxwell Air Force Base – Montgomery, AL 
Naval Supply Corps School - Athens, GA
NAS Jacksonville – Jacksonville, FL 
Mayport Naval Station – Duval County/Mayport, FL
Omega World Travel (Fort Benning) – Columbus, GA

Be sure to take advantage of this free admission special offer for active duty military & veterans along with special savings for their families.

In addition, military ID holders will also receive 20% off most food, beverage and merchandise items each day during Memorial Weekend. Restricions apply to glow vendors, existing deals/coupons and sundries. Simply present your military ID at the register to receive your discount.

Not a member of the military, but still looking for a value? Head to your neighborhood Kroger for best ticket pricing on Adventure Passes and Mountain Memberships.

The show, performed this summer in the theme park’s Aqua Stadium, [...]]]>
LOBO electronic recently premiered its first interactive laser show at Germany’s Holiday Park. LOBO’s Alex Hennig said the show worked better than expected, with thousands of audience members eagerly responding to the commands of a laser-projected girl.

The show, performed this summer in the theme park’s Aqua Stadium, featured a floating water screen, four laser systems, and 18 fog generators. The laser-projected girl gave the audience instructions (such as waving hands, clapping, and singing along to the music). “Surprisingly, the audience really followed even the most demanding actions and this concept really had a booster effect,” said Hennig. To add more excitement, the audience was given small battery-powered fiber lamps that turned the audience area into a sea of moving lights.

Source : The Laserist

The laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is roughly the size of three American football fields, and those in charge of it aren’t joking when they say they’ll create a tiny sun in the next [...]]]>

SCIENTISTS are using the world’s largest laser in an attempt to build a star on Earth.

The laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is roughly the size of three American football fields, and those in charge of it aren’t joking when they say they’ll create a tiny sun in the next few months.

It’s called the National Ignition Facility and it’s all about finding the holy grail of energy production – nuclear fusion – a high-energy reaction that would theoretically provide limitless energy for humanity.

In a nutshell, the laboratory hopes to split its laser beam up into 192 beams, then fire them at a tiny target wrapped in gold that’s smaller than a fingernail.

Nerd alert – inside the target there’s a couple of reactive hydrogen isotopes, so you know what comes next.

The heat from the laser will fuse those isotopes together in reaction that at 100 million degrees Celsius, more than five times hotter than the centre of the sun.

There is a slight radioactive danger, but the lab has encased the facility in concrete walls that are two metres thick, just in case.

But the payoff is that if the isotopes fuse, the tiny star will emit enough energy to power the Earth.

That is, for the 200 trillionths of a second that it survives.

“It’s the most fundamental energy source in nature,” project manager Bruno Van Wonterghem told CNN.

The only fuel it requires is seawater, the source of the aforementioned isotopes.

If it’s successful, the laboratory hopes the project, which has so far been five years in development and cost more than $2 billion, will deliver useable outcomes within 20 years.

“This is something you’re going to tell your grandchildren about,” Mr Van Wonterghem told CNN.

“It’s like standing on the hill watching the Wright brothers’ plane go by.”

Source : news.com.au

As the clock ticked toward the end of the first half of Super Bowl XLIV, two teams huddled on the sidelines, waiting for the signal. Each had a single objective and a tight [...]]]>

Patricia Daukantas

For almost as long as visible-wavelength lasers have existed, artists have been inspired by their potential to create stunning visual displays.

As the clock ticked toward the end of the first half of Super Bowl XLIV, two teams huddled on the sidelines, waiting for the signal. Each had a single objective and a tight timeframe for achieving their goal.

But they weren’t looking to score a touchdown. Rather, these teams were the special-effects technicians for the halftime show. They had nine minutes to ensure that 16 powerful lasers were hooked up and safely aligned to a 40-section platform in preparation for a laser show to accompany the performance of the rock group the Who.

More than 100 million people watched the Feb. 7, 2010, performance on television, making it one of the most-viewed laser shows ever. The special effects teams set up two “laser compounds,” one at each 35-yard line on the New Orleans Saints’ side of the gridiron. Each compound had two 50-W Nd:YAG pulsed lasers, cooled with a recirculating-water chiller, plus two air-cooled, full-spectrum units: a 25-W optically pumped semiconductor (OPS) laser and a 13-W diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) RGB laser.

Laser shows have always held a universal appeal. People from all over the world have enjoyed them at planetariums, concerts, corporate meetings and other venues. In the United States, outdoor laser displays dance across the faces of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington and Stone Mountain in Georgia. They illuminate the pyramids of Giza in Egypt and the night sky above the Hong Kong business district. Coherent beams of color formed pictures of Olympic athletes against the side of the Sydney Opera House in 2000, and, at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, 20 lasers were used in a nightly light show in which people from around the world controlled the beams through public Internet access.

How laser shows work

The stunning visual effects of laser shows rely on some of the simplest optical equipment and principles: moving mirrors and the effect known as persistence of vision—which refers to the afterimage that persists when a point of light moves faster than the eye can react to it. The afterimage lasts for roughly 1/25 of a second.

Anyone can create a crude version of a laser show: Just aim the beam of a laser pointer at the wall and quickly shake your hand side to side to create a colored line. Today’s laser projectors basically do the same thing, only faster and with more precision. They contain prisms, mirrors and other components that laser-show pioneers would have had to have set up by hand.

To produce pictures on a screen or wall during a laser show, two galvanometers—dubbed “galvos” in the industry—use electrical signals to make small mirrors vibrate over a two-dimensional plane. The moving mirrors reflect the beam path fast enough to trace a shape on a target wall or screen. In the trade, this process is called “scanning.”

Simple 2-D manipulations of the mirror make the laser trace the familiar Lissajous figures of complex harmonic motion. Another galvo—or, in some modern projectors, an acousto- or electro-optic modulator—can move a second mirror to deflect the beam to the side, so that it doesn’t exit the projector. This type of modulation is known as “chopping,” and it’s the laser-show equivalent of lifting a pencil from the paper. Similarly, “blanking” modulates the beam by turning the laser on and off rapidly. Chopping and blanking separate line segments, curves and letters of the alphabet.

Laser displays are best suited for drawing outlines of familiar shapes, resulting in cartoon-like images. Today’s laser artists use graphics software to draw the logo or picture they want to reproduce, and then a specialized program translates the image into commands for moving the laser beam with a refresh rate of 15 to 30 Hz, thanks to the persistence of vision of 40 ms (25 Hz). For comparison, most theatrical films run at 24 Hz.

Laser artists can also create “atmospheric” or beam effects, in which the audience can see the laser beams as they move through the air, thanks to Rayleigh scattering. The artist usually uses theatrical fog or smoke from pyrotechnics to create this effect. Sometimes ambient dust will suffice if the beams are very powerful.

“Lumia” is the collective term used for the textured glass or plastic filters that are used to distort the outgoing laser beam into abstract shapes. Galvos and motors usually move these filters to the laser artist’s specifications. Diffraction gratings, both stationary and movable, cause the light to form multiple beams.

Laser art and the far-out 1960s

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists and scientists collaborated on projects for exhibits and concerts on both sides of the Pacific. Many fertile minds, some trained in art and others in science, were eager to explore the visual possibilities of the new medium.

It is difficult to define when the first laser show or laser-art exhibit took place. “The closer you look at it, the fuzzier it gets,” said Patrick Murphy, executive director of the International Laser Display Association (ILDA), a trade association for laser display companies.

An artist named Lowell Cross started visualizing electronic music as a graduate student at the University of Toronto in the mid-1960s. At first he connected an RF modulator to a television receiver to interpret his own music as well as the works of composers John Cage and David Tudor. In 1969, Cross and University of California at Berkeley laser physicist Carson D. Jeffries collaborated on a visual project, and the resulting public performance of sound and music at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., used multiple laser colors with 2-D scanning.

Around the same time, a Washington D.C. sculptor named Rockne Krebs joined a group of artists who were experimenting with the bold colors of acrylic paint. In 1967, Krebs purchased a He-Ne laser and then worked with a University of Maryland scientist to figure out how to use it. After designing a 1968 exhibit of one laser and two mirrors at a Washington art gallery, he wound up working alongside Hewlett-Packard engineers in Palo Alto, Calif., on a display destined for Expo ’70, the world’s fair near Osaka, Japan.

That futuristic international exposition attracted a collective group called Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., whose members brought their cross-disciplinary optical experiments into the public spotlight. The Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 contained the world’s largest spherical mirror—which was made of aluminized Mylar and spanned 90 feet across. In the main hall, visitors could see their reflections hanging upside down above their heads. To get to that hall, they walked through a dark clam-shaped room illuminated by sound-activated laser beams shining downward and tracing Lissajous figures on the floor. E.A.T. commissioned Cross and Jeffries to design the laser-and-sound display.

An estimated 2 million people visited the Pepsi Pavilion during the six months of Expo ’70. However, according to Cross’s website, company officials were not able to maintain the technical exhibits to the artists’ standards, and the building was demolished soon after the exposition ended. Cross moved to the University of Iowa and created a mixed-gas argon-krypton ion laser show—complete with symphony orchestra, soloists and electronic music—for the opening of a new campus auditorium in 1972.

Source : OPN

UVA were commissioned by Virgin Media to create ‘an immersive light installation celebrating 10 years of broadband in [...]]]> Over the past few weeks, we’ve been following the production of Speed of Light, an ambitious laser light installation by United Visual Artists for Virgin Media. The show is now open and it doesn’t disappoint

UVA were commissioned by Virgin Media to create ‘an immersive light installation celebrating 10 years of broadband in the UK’. It comprises a series of laser-based experimental light works which flow through the labyrinthine spaces of the Bargehouse, the four-storey ex-warehouse on London’s South Bank.

On entering the space, visitors are asked to speak into a suspended microphone to answer questions displayed on the wall in front of them. Their answers follow them around the building as they explore the various installations over four floors.

These sounds and others, as well as light, are carried around the building using fibre optics, thus tying in with the broadband theme. See a video of the installation here

Source : Creative Review