The Neural Sky Exhibit is a large interactive exhibit that was designed and built to be exhibited at the Beyond Wonderland Concert and at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The primary goals were to develop and understand strategies that can be applied to interactive architecture. Heavy emphasis was placed on creating a full-scale environment that a person could walk through, interact with, and experience spatially. The large scale environment was developed with over 10,000 computer-controlled LED lights that moved throughout the metal structure like a neural network. From an interactive standpoint, the idea is that the lights connect people within the space by literally connecting their locations with a path of light. From a control standpoint, the project focused on decentralization as a powerful control strategy for such systems of individually networked devices whereby there is no central control system. When such a structure is applied to a large system, there is a potential for emergent behavior when a number of simple systems operate in an environment that forms more complex behaviors as a collective.

Note: This Foxlin project was carried out as a design/build project by students of Cal Poly Pomona.