For Week 7’s Light Fixture, Rui and I planned to work together again and make a wall sconce light fixture.
Concept
Our idea was inspired from the game Tic-tac-toe, and we wanted to transform it into a wall sconce that comprised of nine glowing tiles.
The light will come from the back of each tile, projected onto the background fixture that hosts all the tiles, and mediated out to the environment.
Interaction for Brightness Control
There will be three levels of brightness for each tile: None, Weak, and Strong. There will be two ways to control the brightness: Individual Mode and Centralized Mode.
Under the Individual Mode, which is also the default mode, each tile acts on its own. Users can adjust its brightness though consecutive tapping, and the brightness will loop between None -> Weak -> Strong -> None.
Under the Centralized Mode, users will press & hold on the center tile for a while to activate it, and then all the tiles will be turned into Brightness Selection phase. The top row will represent Strong, the middle Weak, and the Bottom None. Then, the user can tap on one of the tiles to apply its brightness to all other tiles.
Material Plan
Rui mentioned that he is interesting concrete texture, so we are planning to experiment with making concrete tiles using modes. For the background, we’re thinking of using wood as the host.
For the lighting source of each tile, we plan to use LED strips, and fix it onto the back of each tile, and power them using 12V DC converted from AC. Peizo sensors might be used to identify user behaviors.
A current estimation of total power required is:
80mA * 20 * 9 * 12V = 172.8W
Diffuser materials are yet to be determined. The challenging part might be making the light that coming out of the strips appear as homogenized as possible, as well as the light between multiple tiles as homogenized as possible.
