This is a short video about our snow sculpture we did as team Germany

This is a short video about our snow sculpture we did as team Germany at the 2016 International Snow Sculpting Challenge in Whitehorse, Canada. The competition in Whitehorse is one of the very rare events with “no rules”. Snow carving is normally very strict on what tools you use and basically nothing else then snow is allowed.

But here we decided to pimp the sculpture with 2400 LED’s using the great FastLED library in parallel output mode (16 strips, 5 meter long each, with 30 LED per meter). We embedded the LED’s in the snow so you could not see the strips at all. The name of the sculpture is “Be one” and observer had the unique opportunity to interact with the sculpture (to be one with it). For this we added a biometric sensor (capacity) so that people can put their hand on the sensor - depending on the values we got from the sensor we showed different colors and sequences. We also added audio. It was very nice to see how the sculpture attracted hundreds of visitors and basically everybody wanted to interact with “Be one”

We had very strong competitors but we are happy to say that the jury gave us the 3rd place for our sculpture and the installation.

https://youtu.be/phl93PQp0U0

That looks amazing! Any concerns with heat from the LEDs?

Woah, what an awesome creation!

That’s great! Very creative from several points of view!

@Jason_Coon
Hi Jason, heat was on the list of showstoppers. Indeed snow was melted around the strips 5mm in radius. But then it stopped. Basically it melted a “pipe” around the strip and the air in the pipe seems to be a good insulator. The sculpture ran from https://youtu.be/phl93PQp0U0?t=8m00sam to https://youtu.be/phl93PQp0U0?t=12m00spm with not a single LED exposed.

Wow! Awesome