No Atlantic City landmark embodies the slogan “Always Turned On” quite like the light show that plays each night across the surface of Harrah’s Waterfront Tower.

Although it’s not really always turned on—the Lights at Harrah’s Resort run only from dusk into the wee small hours—nighttime visitors to the city can’t miss the dazzling display, which has turned the 525-foot hotel tower into what may be the biggest video screen on the planet, visible up to 10 miles away. (Rubbernecker alert: from afar, the best views are probably from Route 30, the island of Brigantine, and the incoming lanes of the AC Expressway—and the show can also be seen from incoming planes.)

With 36 different animations—tumbling dice, cascading cards, and a rippling American flag, to name just a few—the Lights at Harrah’s are a vivid calling card for the casino giant, a great GPS for people driving into town, and the wave of the future in the use of lights to convey a message, send an invitation and affirm a brand.

Plus, they’re cool to look at. “Dozens of viral videos of the Lights have popped up all over the web this year,” says Danielle Mohn, vice president of marketing for Harrah’s Resort. Among them: a handful of home videos posted on YouTube and viewed by thousands, earning free publicity for the city and the casino. Clearly a very bright idea.

Light Fantastic

So how’d they do that?

The answer—which may be fully understood only by geeks and techies—starts with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which produce illumination through the conduction of energy. The massive light show at Harrah’s is made up of more than 4 million square feet of tiny LED lights wrapped around all four sides of the 44-story tower. Each floor has 700 feet of linear LED fixtures, which look like narrow tubes, attached to the supporting structures between each window. End to end, that’s more than six miles of lights.

More simply, think of a monster HDTV screen stretched out over an entire building. To illuminate the lights, a pre-programmed signal is sent through a command program that is run, believe it or not, from desktop PC. But there is no wizard behind the curtain running this extravagant show. The whole thing is preprogrammed, automated, and works on a timer.

But the show can be changed depending on the occasion, giving the casino an extraordinary opportunity to showcase upcoming concert events, promote gaming tourneys, or simply deliver a crowd-pleasing experience.

Harrah’s famously choreographed real fireworks and video fireworks on the Fourth of July last year, with breathtaking effects (the casino, along with partner Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa, will do so again this month). And during the Christmas holidays last year, the Lights at Harrah’s, starting with a single giant snowflake, turned into a gathering snowfall.

Trompe L'Oeil

Even though the image-producing LED fixtures are mounted about 10 feet apart at each floor of the building, from a distance they look like a seamlessly unfolding video image. That’s just an optical illusion, says Mike Hansen of Tim Hunter Design, which designed the control system and digital media content for the Waterfront Tower.

“When you’re up close, it’s a lot more glass than light tube, which is maybe a couple inches wide at each floor,” Hansen says. “It’s the same as a TV set, or a Seurat painting. Up close, you can see it’s just a bunch of tiny little lines and dots, heavily packed together. But when you step back, the brain puts the image together. This building is done on the same principal, but at a much larger scale. It’s your brain that does most of the work.”

In fact, the closer you get, the more abstract the image becomes—which is impressive in its own way.

“When you’re in the Pool area looking almost straight up, it’s kind of a giant monolithic color-changing face,” says Hansen.

The perspective from inside one of the hotel rooms is surprising, because the light display that is visible for miles becomes suddenly and remarkably unobtrusive.

“The way the fixtures are designed, the light shines outward,” says Bill Groener, president of Tim Hunter Designs. “If you’re in a room and look up, all you can see is a very thin light.”

Exploding Technology

Just as Las Vegas was once defined by its neon skyline, Atlantic City’s silhouette has brightened with the years. Bally’s was one of the first casinos in town to light its entire building as a nighttime attraction, with beaded lights that changed colors. When Borgata came into the market in 2003, it made an elegant statement with bands of shimmering purple that encircled the tower.

Harrah’s first used LED technology in 2002, when architects outfitted the 28-story Bayview Tower with an LED façade. Back then, the special effects were limited to changing colors, sunbursts, color wipes and the like, says Groener.

“The color of the building could be red at one point, then transform into blue, then go into green, or else a rainbow of colors could come from the top down or the bottom up.” While eye-catching, “these were fairly simple lighting effects,” says Groener.

“The resolution was very gross,” agrees Hansen. “Yes, it was cool and innovative for the time, but the example I use is, ‘Compare the old video game Pong to Grand Theft Auto.’ The latest generation is much different.”

The older tower’s lights were programmable by 1-to-2-foot lengths. The new ones can be controlled in inch-long increments for even greater definition. With the exponential improvement in LED technology, more detailed images with higher resolution and an almost 3-D depth of field can turn an entire building into a giant video screen capable of startlingly detailed imagery, like pretty girls dancing around Harrah’s Pool. (If that doesn’t stop traffic, nothing will.)
     
Circling the Globe

The Lights at Harrah’s could be the best show in the Greater Northeast, but similar gee-whiz light installations are getting attention around the world.

At his Denim store in New York City, designer Tommy Hilfiger used LED technology to turn a massive three-tiered chandelier into a video display. The city of Berlin, Germany, which according to Architect magazine is “besotted” with media façades, recently added a 380-foot-long, 40-foot-high LED screen to the new 17,000-seat O2 World Arena.

And the all-new Yankee Stadium has been tricked out with a massive 103-by-58-foot, 1080p HD Mitsubishi Diamond Vision LED display, six times larger than the screen at old Yankee Stadium. The display is embedded with 8,601,600 LED lamps and can capture up to four simultaneous images.

Despite that comprehensive perspective, according to the Yankees, the big screen will not function as a photofinish or replay device; the umps will still make all the calls.

Green Scene
   
Harrah’s is famous for its green commitment, and the Lights fit right into that philosophy, says Jill Klingler of Color Kinetics, which manufactured the lights adorning the Waterfront Tower.

“One of the benefits with LED lights is that they don’t ‘go out,’ like your regular screw-in light bulb. They will fade over time, but even in harsher temperatures they will last and last. At 30,000 to 50,000 hours, the light output depreciates to about 50 percent of the original light. But if you think about it, they’re only running every day from dusk until early morning.”

Which means the Lights at Harrah’s could still be glowing in the year 2055.

“The Lights have become one of the ‘must-see’ attractions not only in Atlantic City, but in New Jersey as a whole,” says Mohn. “We’re pleased people are so captivated by the show.”

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