A Facelift For The View Out Your Livingroom Window

livingroom-view-facelift

[Ken Kawamoto] turned the rather bland view from his livingroom into that of some high-priced real estate. It only works at night, which is going to seem odd since the image above shows a daytime scene. But it’s still a pretty sweet concept.

The video below shows the actual view from his window. We don’t think it’s all that bad (we once lived in a ground-level apartment looking out on a parking lot… yuck!). But the view of the Abbey of St. Étienne in Caen, France seen above is much better. He simply put a projector on his balcony and closed the light-colored blinds. So far he has to bring it in after each use, but we see this as more of a thing to use only when entertaining anyway.

We’ve seen a few other attempts over the years at hacking your view. Here’s one that adds fake windows using LCD screens. The thing that makes that one work is the ability of the system to track the viewer and change the perspective accordingly.

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Bring Your LED Matrix Project Into The Living Room

If you’re able to make a project look this good it shouldn’t be hard to convince that significant other to let you install it in a prominent place in the house. We think [Greg Friedland] pulled this off perfectly by building a 4’x8′ tablet controlled LED matrix.

First of all, everything looks better in a shiny case. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this looks nice, thanks to the face plates which are mounted in a way that gives them a modern style (we’d expect to see this hanging in Ikea). They’re acrylic diffuser panels meant for used with lighting in a suspended ceiling. They do a nice job of scattering the light put off by the 544 LED modules that make up the display. The wiring was made easy by using LED strands where each pixel has its own control chip (WS2801). It sounds like the display will peak at around 160 Watts, which isn’t really that much considering the area. One nice touch that’s shown off in the video after the break is a full-feature iPad interface that even allows you to paint in light using your finger. But we’re also satisfied that [Greg] posted about the physical build too.

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