SEP 08

You might have read about innovative UK consultancy XCO2's innovative quiet revolution urban turbines. Well, they have another trick up their sleeve in the form of their ground-breaking display turbines. 

These turbines rely on the theory of persistence of vision – our brains ability to fuse many fast, static, images into a single moving image.

The theory is simple. The wind turbine blade has embedded within an array of light-emitting elements – high powered L.E.D's for example. These are coupled to an embedded processor, which controls these L.E.D's. For multi-coloured displays, the outputs of a red, green and blue L.E.D can be fused by the eye into a single coherent image.

When we finally start to invite wind turbines into the city, they might carry advertisements and information as we've never seen them before.

More after the jump. 

This phenomenon can often be observed in gadget stores which sell P.O.V. clocks, which display the time by flicking a little sprung plastic element to and fro.

This design of turbine has the ability to generate additional revenue, by selling the display space to advertisers – this could result in a much shorter financial payback for the turbines, which could speed their deployment

Also, the turbines present an interesting visual appearance, which might soften the hearts of those who think wind-displays are ugly.

For EcoGeeks that want to check out what a persistence of vision displays built using L.E.D's look like, check out this DIY site, which is a fantastic resource of a collection of projects related to P.O.V displays.

See Quiet Revolutions

Comments (3)

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Deterrent to use.
written by Rob., September 09, 2006

I would have thought that making the current crop of fairly neutral looking wind turbines, into multi-coloured flickering eyesores, would increase resistance to their deployment.

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Bird brain
written by Chris F, March 13, 2008

I wonder if birds' vision allows them to see this effect. Fitting persistence of vision LEDs to full-size turbines might stop hawks and owls blundering into the blades, which is a source of concern to some anti-wind farm groups.

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