Digg ThisCarson Williams had to shut it down.
I’m talking about this, an imaginative light display on his house just outside of Mason, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. In case you’re wondering, the music is “Wizards of Winter” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
Now, I have a few links in this article, and I have a bit of information; not all of the information here is contained in the articles linked, but I have all of this on good information, all of which is available through a google search.
Carson Williams is an engineer living near Cincinnati, Ohio. He created this Christmas light display with the help of software from Microsoft. In fact, the developer from Microsoft sent Williams the software just before he moved to the Cincinnati area himself, and had no idea where William lived…
Anyway, I digress…
Williams has achieved national attention with this light show; he has been interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show, and had this video published all over the Web. I received this video in an email at my last job, and certain Flash developers there were convinced that it was staged. They weren’t alone.
It was not, in fact, staged; it was entirely too real. It was fantastic, in fact.
The music was delivered by a low-power FM radio broadcast on 96.6 FM (FM broadcasts under a certain wattage don’t need to be certified by the FCC). Williams had two other light displays that ran along with this display, in sequence; “Wizards in Winter” was the most elaborate.
Williams voluntarily shut the display down recently due to safety concerns (I don’t recommend this link due to extremely annoying Flash advertising!). Lines to see the extravagant display took up to 45 minutes just to get through to the street. Evidently, there was an accident where the safety forces couldn’t respond to the area quick enough due to the heavy volume of traffic, so Williams shut the display down.
It’s too bad; this was a nice display of human engineering, of something that could be accomplished with a little thought and ingenuity.
