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"As anyone who's been in or around San Francisco recently knows, it's hard not to spot the Bay Lights. After dusk, the western span of the Bay Bridge fills with a jaw-dropping display comprised of 25,000 LEDs, mounted on vertical cables 30 feet apart. \nEach LED can be controlled individually by computer, and turned on or off 60 times a second via a 1.8-mile fiberoptic cable. This allows spectacular and unique patterns to sweep across the bridge, as they did during the official opening of the Bay Lights project last week (and for weeks of sporadic testing before that.)\nTo put that in perspective, it's more lights than you will find on the entire Eiffel Tower at its most shimmering. An estimated 50 million people will see the Bay Lights over the next 2 years; it's one of the signature features of the forthcoming Americas Cup.\nAnd what computer is controlling this vast display? Some massive IBM server farm? No, says artist Leo Villareal \u2014 a bunch of $500 Mac Minis mounted inside the bridge itself. \n\"At the end of the day, we use whatever works,\" Villareal told Mashable. \"Mac Minis are very robust, small and have solid-state hard drives. They're very nice machines.\"\nUnderlining the \"whatever works\" aspect is this: the programmer for the project is a PC guy. So those Mac Minis are running Windows, via Apple's Boot Camp emulator software (which comes free with OS X).\n\"We're kind of ambidextrous here,\" says Villareal. \"I would consider myself a Mac guy, but the last four laptops I bought were PCs.\"\n\nAs the official lighting ceremony began, Villareal could be found huddled with one of those laptops by the side of the Bay, making last minute tweaks under his umbrella as a sudden squall hit San Francisco and threatened to derail the project. \n\"We didn't want to turn it on and have a Super Bowl moment,\" says the New York artist. \"This is very reliable technology, but it was about as harsh an environment as you can get.\"\nRadar information told Villareal that if he waited 15 minutes to turn the lights on, the storm would have passed. But he switched them on anyway, reasoning that the show must go on. \nSo how are the Bay Lights controlled remotely via laptop? The project's founders asked us not to reveal the answer, citing security concerns. \"We don't want anyone to get hacked,\" says Villareal. That's why multiple Mac Minis are all running the same program, should one fail, and why every single light has been assigned its own IP address.\n\"There's this whole IT aspect to this thing nobody will know about,\" says the artist.\n\nIndeed, it seems much of his time has been spent putting out fires. Bridge authorities feared the lights would be distracting for drivers on the bridge, so they were angled towards the city in such a way that cars coming towards it can't see them. (They can still see the lights in their rearview mirrors, however.)\nThere were also environmental concerns, of course \u2014 though being energy-efficient LEDs, these 25,000 lights use no more than $30 of electricity per night. Still, the Bay Lights project is donating that amount to a local solar power company to offset that usage.\nThe greatest challenge, however, was creating patterns that would look good no matter where in San Francisco you were looking at them. \"It's kind of a crazy puzzle because it's so big and visible from so many angles,\" says Villareal, who set up those pattern programs by looking at the bridge from around the Bay Area. \n\"So many things that work close up at the single pixel level, but all of that is lost from Coit Tower or Sausalito. You need these bold gestures to work from a distance.\"  \nImage courtesy of Baylights.org, Lucas Saugen"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/03/13/bay-bridge-lights/>