I have a few ideas of what I may want to do for my final project. My first thought was to do something involving the aurora borealis. I’ve always wanted to see them in person so I thought it might be a cool idea to bring the auroras to me. Recreating the auroras could be a bit tricky though.

The auroras are like 3-dimensional curtains of light hanging from the sky. You can sort of make out distinctive lines but then those lines fade towards the sky at different heights creating some depth. The trick with creating an artificial aurora would be how to replicate this depth.

My idea was to use LED strips and paper, or some other translucent material. I would have the two pieces of paper run parallel to each other then have the LED strip run between those two pieces. My hope is that the paper will allow the light from the LEDs to be more vertically distinguished so that you can see the fading of the light more easily. By playing with the colors and intensity of the LEDs, I think I could mimic the fading that auroras display and create some depth. I might play around with the materials to make the project more challenging.

Another idea I had was to create an aurora painting of sorts. The idea is to paint a landscape then add slits in the painting. LEDs would then be placed behind the painting so that the light can shine through the slits. I would play around with color transitions and LED brightness to try and get a lively aurora.

The animated aurora borealis painting led me to another idea. What if I could create a light animation? I was thinking I could put an LED matrix under a canvas or some other material I can paint over that allows light to shine through. The matrix under the painting would light up in a specific sequence to create an animation that would interact with the painted scene. I was thinking something along the lines of a bird flying out of its nest or a fish swimming. Perhaps I’ll create a more elaborate animation once I get a handle on the LED matrix.

My final idea was to use fiber optic bundles to create the milky way galaxy. I saw this picture of some fiber optics and I was immediately reminded of the night sky. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could recreate the milky way with the fiber optics.

I think the trick is going to be how to recreate the cloudy depths. I haven’t really thought of how to do that yet but maybe I could use a combination of the fiber optics and the Hari & Deepti paper box method.

I’m having a bit of trouble choosing between these 4 concepts. Which do you guys think is the most interesting? Which would you be more excited to see implemented?