Surprise, surprise!

Starting December 22th, 2003 until January 4th, 2004 there will be a short revival of our interactive light installation known as Blinkenlights: Blinkenlights Reloaded.

The building Haus des Lehrers – currently under reconstruction – will be operated as we did it before. A new version of BlinkenPaint lets you create movies and you can play the interactive game Pong and even activate your personal loveletters with your mobile phone.

Blinkenlights Reloaded uses the technology we have developed for Arcade in Paris last year. That means greyscales. Version 3 of BlinkenPaint supports this as well as our new movie file format BML which is based on XML.

For those unfamiliar with Blinkenlights, the Blinkenlights documentation videos should be the first stop. The videos are available in various formats and sizes and I think they are pretty impressive as well. Check them out.

Meanwhile, the Blinkenlights crew is going to be quite busy during as there is the Chaos Communication Congress taking place at the same time just next to the building. Among other things, the BlinkenArea will show a variety of Blinkenlights clone in all forms and sizes. Check our Blinkenlights Links and the BlinkenArea‘s project overview page to get a glimpse of the growing Blinkenlights universe. That stuff is so encouraging.

Since we have put out the core Blinkenlights source under the Gnu Public License, most projects have adopted our core playlist system, the Blinkenlights file formats and the Blinkenlights Protocol. Among them is MPlayer, which can read Blinkenlights Movies out of the box and send them using the Blinkenlights Protocol to any receiving station.

The whole Blinkenlights toolset can be found on Sven‘s Blinkentools page. The software should compile easily on UNIX systems, including Mac OS X (although you need glib2 installed: use fink). The blinkensim can receive Blinkenlights Protocol streams and display them in a simulator window. We try to provide you with the live data stream of Blinkenlights Reloaded so that you can display the same data at home!

In the coming days, this blog will serve as a daily update on Blinkenlights Reloaded, BlinkenArea developments and the 20C3 as well.