Frank Cohen spent a great deal of time in the tech industry, working on products like NORTON Antivirus, Sun Community Server, and the original Internet products released by Apple. While doing so, he tells Kickstarter, Frank found his nerves calmed by the soothing light of his lava lamp. Now, with his new company, Votsh, Frank’s taken to the crowdfunding campaign to launch a lava lamp for the 21st Century, which he calls Waves. The product, a radiating desk lamp and speaker with color-changing lights, seems simple enough, but, as you learn more about it, you realize just how smart Waves really is.
Waves is a Bluetooth-enabled speaker, surrounded in a box, and topped with animating lights and diffusion filters. Altogether, this gives you a speaker with gentle lighting that you can place on your desk or hang on your wall as a floating shelf. This alone brings the lava lamp concept up to date, but these features are just the beginning. Rather than stick with the plain diffusion filters for your Waves, you can begin cutting away or, if you’ve got access to a local Makerspace like Frank does, use a laser cutter to create elaborate shapes. Soon, Waves becomes your own custom lightbox.
Beyond fancy filters, Waves is a sophisticated piece of decor, hooked into the Internet of Things. With its Bluetooth capabilities, Waves can communicate with other Waves around it and, even, to your social media. Two Waves together will begin syncing to produce the same color pattern and, when programmed properly, 50 waves can be made to generate large-scale color symphonies. For a recent wedding, Frank had one Waves placed on each of the reception’s 50 tables, where they generated a rose pattern as the bride and groom were announced, lighting the way as the couple walked to their table. And, because Waves is also a speaker, the group of 50 acted as a sound system for the evening of the reception.
In the campaign video below, Frank also discusses how Waves can be used with your social media, programmed to generate soft lights to act as your Twitter or Facebook notifications. And all of this can be controlled through smartphone and tablet apps, or on your computer.
So, you might wonder why Waves is featured here on 3DPI. Is there any 3D printing involved in the production of Waves or does the modern lava lamp have any 3D printed parts? Our editor, Rachel Park, wondered just that and Frank was thoughtful enough to record his response and clever enough to make something just for us!
So, you see, Waves has 3D printed components for holding the diffusion filters in place and closing up the access panel in the back. And, as Frank so slyly demonstrated, you can even 3D print your own panels for Waves. With transparent filament, the light from Waves may be able to disperse through your print even better.
The Kickstarter page describes this iteration of Waves as the first in what will become an important device in our everyday lives: “Waves is kind of like the original Apple iPod. Waves is an entirely new computing platform. Waves already built an on-line community to develop and share shows, computer networks to transport content to your Waves, Bluetooth speaker, and radio networks to coordinate animation between multiple Waves. Waves will only grow more beautiful and more beneficial as it ages, just like the iPod grew up to be the iPhone.”
Bold words, but I’m keen to believe them. In order to program Waves’ light shows easily, Frank and his team (based in the USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Australia, and India) created a new piece of software that converts any animation sketches made in Processing, an open source programming tool, into a light pattern for Waves. Due to Processing’s open source nature and large community, there are already countless animations available, so it should be easy to find something for you to try out with Waves. And, as Waves’ own community grows, you’ll be able to find animations without working with Processing itself.
It’s clear that Frank has more ideas in mind for his product. The Bluetooth speaker and lamp will only become more advanced as users and the Votsh team implement more uses for light and sound that can be controlled via the web. I don’t know if it was the custom 3DPI filter Frank made or the device itself, but, if I get $149 (the starting price for a set of two Waves), I might just contribute to the campaign. Head over to the Kickstarter page and decide for yourself!
