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An illuminated dance floor, LED dance floor or disco dance floor is a floor with panels or tiles that light up with different colours. They are used for dance. They were popularised for disco by the 1977 film '' Saturday Night Fever,'' which had gotten its inspiration from a floor that director MIT: The First East Disco Dance Floor
Documentation downloads
An illuminated dance floor, LED dance floor or disco dance floor is a floor with panels or tiles that light up with different colours. They are used for dance. They were popularised for disco by the 1977 film '' Saturday Night Fever,'' which had gotten its inspiration from a floor that director John Badham
John MacDonald Badham (born August 25, 1939) is an English television and film director, best known for his films ''Saturday Night Fever'' (1977), ''Dracula'' (1979), ''Blue Thunder'' (1983), ''WarGames'' (1983), ''Short Circuit'' (1986), and ...
had seen at "The Club", a private supper club in Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1. ...
, Alabama
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.
Early illuminated floors date back to the 1920s, one of the first being built at the Via Lago Café in Chicago
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. They consisted of translucent coloured glass panels lit from below by bulbs.
Modern illuminated floors are lit using coloured LEDs. Usually red, green and blue LEDs are used to get a wide colour range. The floors are typically constructed of solid sided square cells and tiled with a toughened glass
Tempered or toughened glass is a type of safety glass processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with normal glass. Tempering puts the outer surfaces into compression and the interior into tens ...
, acrylic glass
Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) belongs to a group of materials called engineering plastics. It is a transparent thermoplastic. PMMA is also known as acrylic, acrylic glass, as well as by the trade names and brands Crylux, Plexiglas, Acrylite ...
or Lexan
Polycarbonates (PC) are a group of thermoplastic polymers containing carbonate groups in their chemical structures. Polycarbonates used in engineering are strong, tough materials, and some grades are optically transparent. They are easily worke ...
top. The sides and bottoms are made reflective and the top diffuses the light to give an even colour.
The floor can display different patterns and flash under computer control. A row or square matrix of panels share a control module. The control modules are typically connected to the computer via USB
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
cables. USB hub
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...
s handle fan-out to a number of control modules and extend the distance that can be reached. In future, cabling and control will be simplified by connecting the control modules to each other.
The tiles may also have pressure sensors as for a dance mat
A dance pad, also known as a dance mat or dance platform, is a flat electronic game controller used for input in dance games. Most dance pads are divided into a 3×3 matrix of square panels for the player to stand on, with some or all of the pane ...
so the pattern displayed or the music or other effects depend on the dancers.Documentation downloads
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