Inspired by the tiny intricate skeletons of radiolaria, our latest creation continues the trend of bringing oversize nature-inspired origami sculptures to life. RadiaLumia is a 50’ tall sphere covered in 42 moving “shells” and over 100,000 LEDs that all coordinate to create amazing patterns of motion and light depending on user and environmental interactions.
This is the single coolest thing I’ve ever helped design.
I spent 6 months designing every aspect of this sculpture in Solidworks. The structure and mechanics are completely intertwined and all cable runs are internal leaving a very clean exterior. Care was taken to evaluate worst case wind and human loads to satisfy strict engineering requirements from Burning Man since they didn’t want a spiky tumble weed rolling across the desert.
Same as before, we created a scale model and did some photo trickery to get a sense of what the piece will look like.
To simulate what lighting might look like we setup our scale model in a dark room and shined a projector on it. With over 100,000 LED’s this thing will be able to create some pretty amazing patterns.
This was the first test at full scale using the motor and lead screw drive system that I designed. It’s a bit noisy because of the galvanized pipe’s internal roughness and zero tolerance control.