LED streetlights in Las Vegas can entertain with music and videos, all the while listening to what you have to say and watching you say it.
Recent news reports about LED streetlights in Las Vegas that are capable of capturing audio and video sparked the inevitable quip: What happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas.
The news also made the tin-foil hat crowd tighten their own headgear and hand out more for the rest of us. That our motions and words in public are recorded shouldn't be a surprise (see, for example, midtown Manhattan), but it still creeps us out.
Michigan company Illuminating Concepts is installing Intellistreets modules onto Las Vegas streetlights. The units can deliver music and news to passers-by. They can also eavesdrop.
We've covered LED streetlights often, most recently with a look at New York's retrofit project. Other cities, such as Las Vegas, made the switch years ago. Adding eyes and ears to the lights is something new again. San Francisco is also reportedly considering something similar.
Intellistreets uses a number of configurations for new or retrofit applications. In the case of Las Vegas, the post-top modules are added to streetlights already in place with the audio and video sent wirelessly back to the public works department.
Nothing new to see here
Lights that watch us have been around for a while. In 1973 a patent was issued for a 360 degree infrared surveillance with panoramic display. For those wanting to do something on the cheap, patent 5,477,212 offers a fake surveillance camera with a flashing LED that attempts to create the illusion that it's tracking something.
The US and Europe have very different privacy cultures. The UK in particular accepts closed-circuit video system as the norm. In the US, where suspicion of the government is more deep-seated (and perhaps more justified), video surveillance of any type is less welcome.
Increasingly, municipalities and other organizations that deploy video surveillance equipment use IP networks to collect the video data and communicate with the devices. Getting good-quality video from the streetlight to the collection point isn't easy or cheap. Fiber-optic cable provides the highest capacity, but it's expensive to install. Intellistreets uses wired or cellular connectivity between the light poles and the collection servers. Wireless, whether WiFi, cellular, or other, is easiest to add to an existing lighting infrastructure.
It started as fun
Illuminating Concepts seems to have found an indirect path into the surveillance business. In a 2010 company profile on Hour Detroit, we learn that CEO Ron Harwood's first passion is music. He was an ethnomusicology major at Wayne State and manager for Sippie Wallace. He made his way into lighting systems through his long-standing involvement with the entertainment industry.
Harwood has received a couple of patents, including one (see figure at left) for a configuration that combines lighting with a media device that is self-powered by the movement of air through the unit. As the Illuminating Concepts systems evolved, they incorporated two-way communications, giving the ability to produce an Oz-like voice offering information to lost visitors.
The reports about the Vegas lights also noted that UK and Holland pedestrians may be scolded by their streetlights. Here's a video shot in the shared gardens of a North London housing complex, in which a disembodied voice warns off a resident who has dared to venture there.
LED lighting systems are good for these types of surveillance operations, notes a UK CCTV site, for pretty much the same reasons that LED lighting is good for streetlights. They're efficient, long-lasting, durable, and give good quality light. Some video units only use the IR spectrum and so are better suited to black-and-white imagery, but full color is becoming more practical and more precise.
Whether all this is a good idea or not is a topic left to the public sector debate. Some folks, particularly those who see Obama's funding of these spy devices as a signal that the end times are coming, might never be convinced.
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