You might want to recheck that last math. It should be 111,000 diodes.

The combination of this and lsd/mushroom would be an exciting venture.

This venture of which you speak has been achieved, en masse.

+ Watch video

Those remind me of V.I.K.I. from I, Robot.
You know, with the small boxes with the faces?

whoooa dude... totally rad!

Keeping up with the Joneses just took a whole new dimension this holiday season.

I want.

LED cubes? Dean Koontz mentioned this at one of his novels...and it was a old book. (could dean koontz be the next messiah?)

@stargatefan.0418: But the vid says 16x16x16 which is 4096. Im confused now.

@itb: Yes. Its Logic is Undeniable.
Spooky.

@Wess: he's talking about the proposed 48x48x48 version which Haroon has listed as 11,000 LEDs.

Your math fails you. 16 * 16 * 16 * 3 = 12,288 individual diodes. Since each pixel contains red, green, and blue diodes.

It looks like they're using something like this:

[www.elexp.com]

The tricolor LED's mentioned above cost $1.35 a piece. I went and looked at an LED site, and that's about the same price as a triple of common red, blue and green LED's in big lot sizes.

Going with $1.35 per pixel, that's $1.35 * 48^3 = $150k for the LED's alone. Now throw in several miles of wiring, and you end up with a pretty expensive lava lamp.

You'd really have something if there could be an extra transparency bit for unused LEDs. This might work better with thin fiber optics delivering the light to each 3D location to a little translucent or clear sphere. This an obviously good application for a MATLAB based controller.

Wow, you write as if you are sleep deprived. Get some rest. Mix in a spell check. Write a blog in the morning.

Give me... now!

@Wess:
The video shows the 16x16x16 (4096 LED) prototype. Seekway plans on building models up to 48x48x48 (a whopping 110,592 LEDS, not 11,000).

I was excited about the 3D possibilities of this device. Then I watched the video. This needs some work...

@Jango: From what I could tell (my Chinese isn't very good), they're using multicolor LEDs, so it is just 16x16x16 (not x3).

@Steve Hollasch: You wouldn't think they pay list price if they're using ungodly amounts of them.

How come no one thought about nice round edges for that cube?

@malaklaze: that would be because cubes don't have "nice" round edges

It's cool, but it's seizures too.

Nice, but LED size is one of the issue, so is the connecting wires. the display seems to be impractical.

A True 3D Display should have 1mm x 1mm or LESS in size of LED, atleast 800 x 800 and wires connecting to LED's should be at most .01 mm.

I believe with todays technology, this should not be that far.

"Very little will happen at first, and then a spark will pop into existence. It will hang for an instant, hovering in space, and then it will split into two, and those will split again, and again, and again... a detonation beyond all imagining, the big bang on a small scale."

Well, that's what I thought when I saw the neat little snow thing going on.

Looks cool, though I would be interested to know how to build one myself.

Now RGB Leds are about $10/ea (4 leads needed for R, G, B and Ground). Surface-mount RGB LEDs are about $1.20 each (6 leads needed)

So if they used 4096 LEDs, that's only $40K just in LEDs (and maybe less for the bulk order). However, if they used surface mounted LEDs (RGB), it would be cheaper (but not as bright).

This site has some interesting LEDs and prices...

[www.ledtronics.com]

Why not just stack 16 OLEDs far enough apart to make a cube shape, then only use the pixels spaced out 1/16th of the screen size away from each other to create the same effect.

I'd like that as a coffee table!

Needs 3D pong.