The renowned lectures have taken place annually since 1825, and are designed to introduce science to children, and further their appreciation of the subject.
Entitled Back from the Brink, Hugh Montgomery's 2007 lectures dealt with human survival. He needed a visual means to represent the amount of power consumed by the body's organs in normal operation and came to Crockford to provide an innovative solution. He suggested the Pixi-Web - as a portable, transparent modular screen for displaying complex lighting effects or live video images.
The Pixi-Web was rigged on a catenary wire in front of the stage set, so it could be swept on and off accordingly. Crockford then converted the 'power' of the body organs Montgomery was speaking about into LEDs, and programmed the Pixi-Web to visually represent the correct amount for each organ.
Artistic Licence supplied a dongle for their Colour-Tramp product, allowing Crockford to map exactly the correct number of pixels of the Pixi-Web to the specific organs, and subsequently animate them, illustrating their power consumption. Each organ was also appropriately identified by a unique colour.
Crockford comments, "It created a massive 'wow' factor when the audience realised they could visualise how much power their entire bodies were drawing, especially as they could compare and contrast each organ within the body. Using this unusual and novel application of today's lighting technology in the very building where Michael Faraday started the Christmas Lectures was a great honour." The lecture was broadcast on Channel 5 on Christmas Day.
(Jim Evans)
