Projection Mapped Disco Balls Fill A Room With Strange, Groovy Light

Think of mirror balls and you think of dance floors in cheesy clubs—but it doesn't always have to be that way. Rescuing this disco staple from the naffness that it's been lumbered with is Kyle McDonald and Jonas Jongejan and their installation Light Leaks, which recently featured at the CLICK festival in Denmark.

Creative Applications Network reports how the piece is "an attempt to fill a room with projected light in a way that can’t be achieved with projectors alone." So the piece is composed of fifty mirror balls which the graphics are mapped onto using three projectors. This floods the darkened room in waves and pools of pixelated light for an immersive experience, one that would equally suit the inside of a club as well as the walls and ceiling of your living room as you sat there and zoned out.

Here's what the pair say about the project:

A scattered array of mirror balls reflect light from multiple projectors, filling a room completely with small reflections, casting patterns that fill the visitor’s peripheral vision. Creating a curious space that alternates between a meditative state, and an uneasy imbalance. An experiment in combining a found object with computer vision in order to create a profound and unusual experience.

So, if you thought disco balls had had their day, you were mistaken—they're alive and well and being reborn as a new canvas for complex projection mapping.

Modeling the space

Photos courtesy of Kyle McDonald

[via Creative Applications Network]

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