Viral video: Digital dance crew Team iLuminate blows everyone’s minds

By Andrew Couts August 3, 2011

team-iluminate — Image used with permission by copyright holder

NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” is still a ways away from deciding the winner of this season’s competition. But if today’s viral video line up is any indication, the Internet already has its champion: the massively talented dance crew Team iLuminate.

What makes Team iLuminate so staggeringly unique is the crew’s use of the iLuminate wearable lighting system. Developed by Miral Kotb, a dancer, Columbia University-educated software engineer, and iPhone app maker, the iLuminate system uses wearable lightweight LEDs and electroluminescent wire (el-wire), which are attached to the dancers’ outfits, and controlled via with computer or a custom iPhone app.

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The system turns the lights on and off to correspond with the music, as the choreographer desires. When all other lights are shut off, the effect it produces is nothing short of amazing. After seeing Tuesday night’s performance, Howie Mandel, one the “America’s Got Talent” judges, couldn’t contain his excitement, saying that Team iLuminate was “by far — by far — the best thing I have seen on this show.” The other two judges, Piers Morgan and Sharon Osbourne, were equally generous with their compliments.

In addition to having a software engineer on its team, the Team iLuminates further bolstered its nerd-cred by using a dubstep rendition of the Jenova Project theme music from Final Fantasy VII as one of the songs in Tuesday night’s performance.

Kotb and crew have plans to bring the iLuminate system to the masses with the soon-to-launch uLuminate mobile app for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. We don’t know much about the app thus far, but according to the app’s website, it will enable a user to “light yourself up from a handheld device.”

In the mean time, check out Team iLuminate’s two “America’s Got Talent” performances below.

August 2 performance:

May 31 performance

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