Hadrian’s Wall, UK. September 10, 2012 — As a summer of Olympic sporting triumphs fades into happy memories for another four years, spare a moment to look at M2M’s impact on one display in the cultural Olympiad.
‘Connecting Light’, part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, has been described as the world’s largest digital art installation, running along the whole 73-mile (117 kilometre) length of Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site.
Construction of Hadrian’s Wall began in the year 122 AD, as a defensive fortification for Roman Britain. It was designed to protect Roman-occupied England from attacks by tribes north of the wall in today’s lowland Scotland. Built largely during the rule of the emperor Hadrian, it was the first of two fortifications built across the narrowest part of Britain.
The light installation consisted of hundreds of large scale, light filled balloons transmitting colours from one to another, creating a light-operated communication network spanning over seventy miles. Connecting Light was driven by Digi International‘s iDigi Device Cloud, Programmable XBee radios and ConnectPort X4 cellular gateways. Digi Professional Services helped to design the network architecture as an ‘internet of things solution’.
The organisers describe the huge interactive art display across Hadrian’s Wall as a “Model for Modern Connected Business”.
Digi developed the machine-to-machine (M2M) system powering the art installation for London’s Cultural Olympiad in less than two months.