News - Pixelstick light-painting tool zooms past Kickstarter goal

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Brings bumper modern tech boost to 19th Century art of light painting (great video).

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Why the heck would anyone want this?

Have no use for this...kind of fun to have one though.

Oh, that is very cool.

I can't get my head around their method here. A major issue with 'light painting' is the alignment of things like text - yet they seem to have perfect alignment - despite only doing one column of pixels at a time? How did they manage to do that artwork with the avatars? I can't see how they were able to advance the pixelstick smoothly enough for it to come out anything like as well as that.

Anyway another issue for me is that they just looked photoshopped - and in fact I suspect it would be far easier for many of them to be done in photoshop. Whereas there was no photoshop in the good old days..

As a photographer myself I think this is brilliant and it's the single-handly most useful and versatile tool there is out there for light painting. It's done during a long exposure photograph, once the shutter is open you pass the devise along and the leds flicker on and off and change colour to paint out the image you want. It's all automatic and very simple. Obviously is takes practise to know what speed you are supposed to move at to get the image too look right but the speed is programmeable. None of those images would have happened first time, it would have taken practise and lots of trial and error.

In responce to miniyazz, I don't see your point - you say it would be easier to do in photoshop but in the good old days they didn't have it. The point of this is to NOT use photoshop and instead use a tool that goes back to the good old days of photograhic long exposures and light painting but give it a modern update. Using lights like these is by no means a new thing but its certainly the most advanced and easily used one. I think it's brilliant and I can't wait to get my hands on it!

The CN Tower in Toronto has been doing this for over 5 years. It displays a picture of the canadian flag, a canadian Mountie, and some other stuff, 1 line at a time, on its column of coloured lights up the tower. Nobody noticed this secret for years, until just a few months ago.

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Originally Posted by miniyazz

I can't get my head around their method here. A major issue with 'light painting' is the alignment of things like text - yet they seem to have perfect alignment - despite only doing one column of pixels at a time? How did they manage to do that artwork with the avatars? I can't see how they were able to advance the pixelstick smoothly enough for it to come out anything like as well as that.

Anyway another issue for me is that they just looked photoshopped - and in fact I suspect it would be far easier for many of them to be done in photoshop. Whereas there was no photoshop in the good old days..

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Gyroscope sensors. That's how. They can use a gyroscope, possibly combined with an accelerometer, and process said sensory input to determine when to advance the 1-line frame to produce the desired picture.