Fareastgizmos: Panasonic Space Player, a new type of lighting equipment combining the functions of traditional lighting and video projectors to create new options and ideas in spatial lighting for the ambient lighting market will go on sale in Japan from July 1, 2014.
7 comments:
This looks pretty cool for uses in displays though I think for theatre it might make media and lighting step on each others' toes quite a bit more than they already do. Media is still kinda new and coming out in the industry, so I don't think they should be combined with another department just yet.
These things would be really cool for the uses that the article describes. Lighting a statue when projecting the name plate next to it. That way the museum doesn't have to get a bunch of new name plates every time things get switched around.
I don't know what kind of use they would have for every day people though. I don't think consumers will have much a use for it in their homes, so these may go out of style pretty soon.
I don't see this as a game changing product. I was a little confused by the description of the Space player, It doesn't sound like it is actually a light and a projects. It sounds like it is actually just a projector that can project solid light. There is nothing that this product can do that we do not already do with our regular projectors. Although I don't think it has any new features I also think it has some use. It looks like Panasonic is attempting to get the the storefront marketing world to use projections. This isn't a product aimed at consumers or professionals, but rather something in-between. The Space Player is aimed at companies that don't know very much about using projectors. I can see how this product is useful, just not for theatre.
I agree with Akiva in that I was a little confused by the description which made it sound like it was both a conventional lighting unit and projector in one when really it's just a projector that can emit a solid beam. That being said I'm sure it could still be used for some pretty cool effects in stores, which are the intended market. Being able to light a product while also projecting information about it from a single unit could be really awesome. But you would also need someone good enough at visual effects to program your displays. Overall I would again agree with Akiva in saying that it could be a useful product, just not for theatre.
It seems a bit silly to use such a sophisticated piece of technology for ambient lighting- it seems like you might want to just use a normal projector for name-plates or something and then use normal lights as well. This seems like a cool way for stores and maybe museums to use projections in displays, but I'm not sure it's too applicable to theatre yet. It is pretty cool- it might be interesting to use it in a lobby or something to set the mood for a piece, or to use in unconventional spaces.
I don't like the idea of lighting with media, even though we run into it so often here at CMU. The thing about lighting with media is it never looks as good as promised. You sacrifice a lot of light and light quality when you try to use projectors to light things. Thus, as far as I can tell, although the Space Player may be welcomed as a way to change a space's atmosphere, it won't in any way replace conventional space lighting.
I think Akiva and Phillip have hit the nail on the head with the statement "could be useful, just not for theater." I like the idea of building a projector into a non-standard housing however to make it more discreet. The example images shown in the audio do a good job of showing the product in really interesting use cases, such as storefronts and museums. In both these situations, a standard projector has great potential to become obtrusive, and even a pico projector would look out of place. The nice part about embedding a projector into a light-fixture-esque housing is that you can put it anywhere and it will look like it is part of the usual lighting of the space, obscuring the source of the projections and making them, at least in my mind, more impactful when used in the way suggested by the article
This seems like an interesting product that will do well in its intended market if they clients have people who can do the programming or if panasonic provides the service at a reasonable price. This product would be most useful in a space that changes a lot or need to change the atmosphere over a short period of time. I do agree that this won't have many applications in theater, at least at this point in time. But as we all know, theater has a tendency to adopt things not designed for it.
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