Eye of Gorlack

Hue ball 1 Hue ball 2 Random Fade Steer Roast 2010

The Eye of Gorlack is a computer controlled three foot diameter hemisphere covered with 1080 superbright RGB LEDs 2008/2009.

I got the idea to build it when I saw some of Fr0stbyte's work on display--specifically, Chromadome. I was so impressed with the piece that I spent the next 3 months (while I was backpacking through China) thinking about what I saw and how I would go about building it. Ultimately, the idea started to form in my head, and my final implementation turned out uniquely.

The Eye is built on a frame of steel tubing, constructed into a 2-frequency geodesic; it has 40 faces. The faces themselves are circuit boards, each with an independent microcontroller dedicated to reproducing colors and communicating with the host computer. There are several visualizations for the Eye, many mathematically inspired, from a quadric equation graphed and a finite automata representing heat dissipation, to a strange attractor, to a "quilt" that fades between many colors and a "cylon eye" that randomly flashes extremely bright light.

I couldn't have made the Eye without the help of three of my friends: Brian Neltner taught me how to design and debug electronics and work with LED lights, Aysylu Biktimirova helped me build most of the physical structure and wire harnesses, and Kyle Miller wrote a number of the visualizations.

Eye of Gorlack Prototype