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Design

[Burning Man] Raising an LED Sky Over the Desert

The 'Large Hadron Kaleidoscope Ceiling' is a kaleidoscopic vision seen through heart-prism glasses.
All images courtesy the artists

This year’s Burning Man Festival is themed "Carnival of Mirrors," which ought to be a healthy addition to the list of disorienting factors within the festival. One of the most outstanding plans for a Burning Man art installation we’ve seen yet, in fact, corresponds with the theme perfectly: It's described on Kickstarter as a “mirrored chamber” wherein you can “lose yourself in a dazzling field of shifting LEDs.” The only thing that might be more stunning than a starry desert sky at night? The Large Hadron Kaleidoscope Ceiling.

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As if hundreds of individually-controlled lights weren't stimulating enough, the installation's creators have fashioned special heart-generating glasses to accompany the view. “They use prismatic diffraction grates that makes it so that when light comes in, it makes heart patterns. So any point of light that is in your field of vision, instead of just being a point, it will turn into a heart,” Rob Moore, one of the ceiling's creators, tells The Creators Project. “They’ve been pretty amazing for stuff like fireworks, but hopefully they’ll be particularly more fantastic for something where there’s an infinitely large plane of points of light.”

Below are some renderings of the Large Hadron Kaleidoscope Ceiling, but you’ll have to journey to the desert to feast your heart-filled eyes with the real deal.

Also, check out this video of the artists describing the making-of the ceiling:

Click here to learn more about the Large Hadron Kaleidoscope Ceiling.

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