[grena1re]

Happy to help. I'm Alex Green–the creator of the Sugar Cubes and co-founder of Symmetry Labs.

To your question about how the Sugar Cubes work:

First of all, the game-powered-by-bikes installation at the Super Bowl is a custom game we developed for the Fan Zone at Super Bowl City. Light Cycle is a two-minute interactive light installation experience where players physically generate energy with bikes and hand cranks. It's built from the Sugar Cubes, which are modular cubes that can be reconfigured in any shape and are driven by our proprietary software. (We have built everything from stage sets for live shows and music videos to a giant Cube chandelier for The Foo Fighters last year.)

The Cubes are wired with addressable LED strips and they can display practically any pattern–usually synced with music. A Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm within our custom software allows the person running the Cubes drive animations using the various frequencies in the music. The cubes can also react to midi input. The structure itself is modeled so that each LED acts as a pixel within a 3D dimensional canvas.

If you get to stop by Super Bowl City in SF, you can play with the Cubes in real-time. (They'll be there until Super Bowl Sunday.) Or you can go to the Symmetry Labs website, play with a simulator, and pretend to be a genre-defying DJ :)

Happy to answer more questions about how the Cubes work! They’re the love of my life right now, the technical possibilities are practically endless, and we have exciting plans to use them in many new ways in the future.