Audiences loved surround sound and Dolby Digital in theatres so much they wanted to take it home with them. Home video was so much fun that they decided they wanted to make their own. And who needs Bon Jovi when you have Garageband and can make your own music? Some lighting makers are looking at this historical DIY phenomenon and realizing that lighting will soon be no exception to the trend of bringing it all back home. With a stop at the mall first. “Architainment,” is the term David George, president of A.C. Lighting, uses to describe the trend. “You’re already seeing the lighting that’s at the shows in Las Vegas migrating into the casinos,” he says. “The proliferation of LED lighting has increased that tremendously in the last couple of years. Now it’s moving into stores. Malls are using things like moving lights to illuminate their lobbies, and not just for special events. It’s a regular thing now, entertainment lighting used in architectural applications.”
George hasn’t seen the trend touch on the residential market yet except at the very high end, but he agrees that as markets like architectural and retail, as well as high-end residential, heat up, they begin to create the economies of scale needed to cost-effectively service the mass residential market.
Nick Freed, president of Inner Circle Distribution in South Florida, concurs. “We’re seeing it happen at the high end of the housing market here in Florida, with people lighting up their homes and grounds with more sophisticated lighting systems,” he says. “Our Panorama LED, which is small, runs forever and operates on a program, is moving into that market. Everyone wants his or her house to be like Disneyland.” Freed says the idea of the “crossover fixture”— a sort of Holy Grail automated lighting system that leads the market from professional entertainment applications to residential ones— is still over the horizon. But, he believes, it’s simply a matter of time. When it does come, though, he suspects it will have some association with video, which he thinks will be the crossover medium for entertainment-style lighting in the home.
“Coincidentally enough, I recently had someone approach me with a product idea that used a fog machine to add another dimension to DVD,” says Freed. A DVD disc would be retro-striped with time code that would then trigger preprogrammed fog, water mist and light effects. “People see video screens and pyrotechnics at concerts and want to take that home with them,” he says. “Also, people can now make pretty sophisticated videos themselves at home. I can see them wanting light effects to go with that, too. These are things that will contribute to entertainment lighting moving into the residential market.”
Other forces are also at work. The once-robust housing market is stalling, especially in upscale regions of the U.S. Home developers have been creating deepening ties to the AV integrator market, seeking ways to achieve cost-effect scaling of home theatres, whole-house audio and house-wide wireless access. Developers look to this technology to help them differentiate their housing products in a saturated marketplace.
Makers of home audio and video entertainment technology product have sensed this and have reacted, such as Sony, which launched two lines of new products developed solely for the new-home integrators market three years ago. These manufacturers and integrators are building the template for how lighting manufacturers and LDs will mesh themselves into the same markets in coming years.
“There’s no doubt that the AV guys have been the catalyst for what’s already going on, and they are setting the pace for how it can happen in lighting, too,” says George, who adds that it’s not unrealistic to suggest that tech-savvy homeowners will add motion lighting as a function of lifestyle and high-tech lighting as a result of bringing more professional video into the home. “Architectural lighting engineers are already starting to troll at LDI and PLASA, looking for lighting technology ideas they can adapt outside the realm of entertainment,” he says. “We’re already doing business with several architectural firms. LEDs and smaller moving-head systems are already getting popular.”
Home recording studios brought music production into the residential setting to feed the infinite distribution vastness of the Internet. In the process, it changed the pro audio industry, moving software companies to the forefront and relegating many big hardware makers to alsoran positions, or worse. If home video authoring software and youtube.com have the potential to remake the video industry along the same lines, lighting is going to be a necessary part of it. The question becomes, how will the lighting industry react, and when will it start to do so?
People took revolving light balls out of discos and hot oil projectors out of ‘60s rock concerts and brought them into their dorm rooms and apartments. In the age of the McMansion and the zero lot line house in the gated community, how long before the MACs find their way into the McMansions?
