The thread starts with Prudential's VP of marketing, Michael Hines, who contacted Capital Manufacturing of Pennsylvania, explaining that he was after something unique. It seems that with the ever-cheaper availability of LED technology, almost all new signs in Times Square include a video billboard scrolling pre-packaged advertising. Standing on the corner of The New 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, Prudential met with Capital's project manager Brandon Bennett to discuss ideas. Bennett suggested that the sign could be programmed using the telephone - in other words using dedicated lines to transmit DMX. Hines ran with that idea which would allow the general public to control the sign live just by calling it up.
Capital contacted Entertainment Technology, the makers of the popular Horizon Lighting Control system and Decisive Business Systems of New Jersey to build an integrated control solution comprising an automated telephone system playing recorded messages and a Visual Basic application that communicated directly with the Horizon Playback Controller. The sign itself is made up of 1600 metres of fibre optics outlining the Rock logo, each section of which can be individually dimmed and change to one of eight colours. The lines of latitude and longitude are also multi-coloured fibre optics. The letters are each stroked with about 10 vertical circuits of neon on the front, and backlit by four different colours. There are over 2000 light sources and approximately 500 channels used to control the sign.
Most of the programming was done from the tranquil rural setting of the Shock Lighting office about an hour north of Toronto, Canada. Because the project includes different colours of neon and fibre that could change colour, no commercially available visualization package could model the sign for off-line programming. Using Horizon's open Telnet protocol, Shock Lighting's Robert Bell used the DWG shop drawings to build his own Visual Basic for Applications extension to AutoCAD. "It brings me back to my days at CBC when I first wrote LXMOV, the AutoCAD proof-of-concept for WYSIWYG which first gained public attention through an article published by L&SI in March '94 - 'CBC Spawns CAD System'. This new system of bi-directional communication between AutoCAD and Horizon lets me point and click and see the results immediately. Then, using a modem, I can log-in to the sign directly to take complete remote control - from Canada." Horizon's remote monitoring capabilities allow Bell to query the sign to see what it's up to, or find out how many people have called it to date, and what the most popular programme is.
