Everyone understands the idea of pixels; array ‘em in a 2D grid and presto, you’ve got an LCD screen for a laptop. But what about arraying them in a 3D grid, like a cube? You could display information in remarkably weirder ways — with icons that move forward and retreat, for example, or blobs that change shape as they track data.

I’ve seen a couple of great examples of this, mostly by students and fellows at NYU’s ultracool ITP, where my friend Tom Igoe teaches. One year I showed up at their open house and saw a cube with embedded LEDs created by James Clar; you can see a video of it in action online here. Another year I saw Glowbits, a set of glowing ping-pong-balls on sticks that you could raise or lower to create patterns — which would raise or lower corresponding ping-pong-balls on a similar display in front of another user. Imagine using that for instant messaging! Digital-age smoke signals!

Anyway, the point is that today I saw one of the weirdest 3D dislays ever — Electric Moons. The web site describes it thusly:

The “electric moOns” installation consists of 100 helium filled balloons. Each balloon is attached to a thin cable. The length of the cable and thus the floating hight of every balloon can be adjusted stepless with a cable winch from 0-5 meters. Additionally each balloon is lit from inside with dimmable superbright LEDs. The 100 balloon-voxels (volume pixels) are arranged in a 10x10 square (8x8 meters).

There are pictures of it here and a video of it in action. What I really want, though, is for someone to use a 3D display to create a video game. Transforming a puzzle game like Tetris or Bejeweled into a 3D format would fry my noodle.

(Thanks to Tod for this one!)