Study on the modular toolkit for the LED based media art

Abstract

Media artists usually have paid so much time and effort for making their works and integrating hardware systems because of little knowledge and skill about hardware, especially controlling LED systems, which have been focused frequently for several years among them. Even though they could make the system, it had often no stability or reliability. Because of these causes they have co-worked with hardware engineers. But, it has caused high cost or engineers could often meet the difficulties of skill. Finally, the scenario resulted in being changed. However, if media artists for themselves can make the system with LED or they already know how to make it, it can be resolved so much. To help overcome this difficulty this study has developed the L-Luminaria which is a hardware toolkit to control LED lights and prototype functional physical interactive devices. L-Luminaria provides a set of reusable small input and output components, and integration into existing interface works. L-Luminaria has a goal to aid media artists who make their works including LED light system form their early design process. L-Luminaria is easy to be used and has extendibility for a big scale light system also. It supports the visual toolkit such as Macromedia Flash media artists have used usually. In this paper L-Luminaria was applied to a real work of Media Art, and through this experiment LLuminaria is useful to make the interactive LED light system easily and easy to extend the system as big scale for media artists.