Four years ago, the City of New York held an internationl competition to design the next generation of streetlights for the city. The winner? A lighting design firm from none other than the Big Apple itself – a company called the Office for Visual Interaction. If their prototype makes it through the testing stage, it will become the standard streetlight across the whole city.

It looks nothing like ordinary streetlights. Because its head contains 100 (relatively) small LED bulbs, rather than one giant bulb, the designers had much greater flexibility in choosing a shape. They settled on something long and thin, which makes the streetlight look graceful and light, rather than bulky and 20th century.

The LEDs, of course, will save energy – about 30% compared to sodium. But the bulbs and lenses in each light also offer the ability to be arranged into customized configurations to deliver different “footprints” of light. So, depending on where they are located, the light can be directed to illuminate exactly what is most useful (see the schematic above).

Via WIRED