Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/12/05/laser-projected-christmas-ligh.html
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Can you show us what the tree looks like?
Also, what’s the safety concern with these things? The image in the article shows the laser dots going right in the window. Is this safe for toddlers and pets? Has it been broken up so much that it doesn’t matter?
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I would think this would get stolen in a hot minute. What bored suburban punk could resist? Not the one I was, in any event.
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Idiots with laser pointers get arrested for aiming them at aircraft, but apparently it’s okay for folks to have randomly scattered lasers pointing up if it means having a cool-looking X-mas display.
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Lasers are cool, but I’m kinda surprised to see that more people don’t take advantage of the cheap video projectors that are available these days. You can get an LED lamp projector (20k hour lamp life) with a built in media player for under $100 and have animated snowflakes and other winter scenes projected on your house. I guess the biggest hitches are securing them against theft (due to perceived value as much as anything else) and protecting them against weather.
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The neighbor has one, and somehow a few stray lights end up also shining in through the windows, which has caused all sorts of confusion as suddenly household electronics seemed to have lit green lights when they were turned off, etc.
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The person who mentioned pointing lasers at aircraft has a point:
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Hey, the red specks spell out stuff. I’m seeing “GoPro.” “GoldenPalace.com,” “Ovaltine,” …
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honestly, i was wondering about the safety of them, too. but then my second thought was that our ancestors risked life and limb EVERY YEAR to put lights up high on homes and in trees, and this is how we carry on the time-honored tradition? with laziness enabled by technology? no wonder our grandparents feel we’re headed in a downward spiral!
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I wonder how the light pollution from these compares to that of traditional bulbs.
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For next-level awesomeness, you can also custom-map the video footage to your home!
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I’ve seen a version of these laser projectors at my parent’s neighborhood either last year or the year before. They look good enough that i would consider it, especially for the ease of installation vs traditional lights.
My one issue is that when lighting up the front of a house you then run into the problem of having a laser pointed at… well… the front, and if someone walks out of the house at night they may need to walk into the path of the lights and i don’t know if they’re harmful to the eyes or not.
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AH! I saw two of those this week and wondered what they were.
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“I assure you, captain, this is the most logical way to illuminate a pon farr tree.”
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Several years ago I was fed up with the squirrels who ate the wires of my LED bulbs on a lovely hemlock in my backyard, so I got a few sets of cheap laser pointers, (red, green, blue @ 5 mW each for $15) with the diffraction gratings to produce the array of lovely dots. I was going to mount them from a balcony so they would generally aim downwards for plane safety…
Physics lesson: the green worked fine, but the red and blue hardly showed up at all because evergreens are GREEN, so they don’t reflect red or blue very well…
I still got my money’s worth by adding a dichroic beam-splitter and some first surface mirrors and assembled a “white” RGB laser pointer.
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Not a fan. My wife calls it “Christmas pox.”
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I stole my neighbor’s idea. The wrapped lights around the trunk and then made a wide halo of lights on the lower branches and hung snowflake lights from the halo area.
It gives the tree a other-worldly Christmas charm.
