Become a UFO: Hokey Spokes
OK, you’re never going to take these on your weekly chain gain. You’re way too serious a cyclist for that. But the appeal of these goofy spoke lights is still too hard to ignore. Leave it to an MIT grad to invent something this far over the top.
As computers got smaller and smaller, Dr. David Hoch, founder of Illumination Design Works, had a brilliant idea. What if you made tiny, transparent plastic sleeves in different colors and attached them to bike spokes … then inside each one, you put a row of LED lights? As the wheels started to turn, the lights would make continuous traces in the air…. Nice, but nothing special.
The MIT spin was this: Hoch put a computer in each “blade” to control the pattern of the traces. So now, when the wheels spin, the lights make any design he chooses — geometric patterns, splashes of color, silly lettering, whatever.
At night, if you ride with these blades spinning in your wheels, you come and go from view like an unidentified flying object. His pitch is that you’ll be more visible from the side. Fair enough. But you’ve got to really be up for something funky to make that happen.
Check the Video anyway. It’s cool. A cyclist disappearing and reappearing in the dark as he rides: Hokey Spoke Video