Imagine yourself at night, wearing dark clothing and holding a six-foot stick lined with LED lights. As you turn on the stick, it twinkles in many colors, looking something like a rainbow light saber. A friend with a camera nearby gives you a cue and you start walking with the LED stick.
The result, when you edit the image later, looks like a lit-up ribbon floating in the streets.
That is the experience users are promised with a new product called the pixelstick, developed by Bitbanger Labs. It's a more advanced version of light painting, the process in which you use long-exposure photography to capture the movement of light (you know, like in those photos where everyone spells out their name with a glowing ember at a bonfire).
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In a video on their Kickstarter page, Steve McGuigan and Duncan McCloud Frazier show off the gadget's ability to create awesome ribbons of light and animations.

Housed by an aluminum body, the stick runs on 8 AA batteries. Your SD card is read by its controller box with buttons that acts like the pixelstick's brain. Before heading out to the streets, you simply choose an image, open it in Photoshop and then save it to your SD card.
One line at a time, pixelstick reveals the images that you pre-loaded on the card through its 198 RGB LED lights. Each LED light corresponds to one pixel, meaning each image can be up to 198 pixels tall. The wand then creates this image through the LED lights and you capture the magic on your camera. For more spontaneity, you can skip that step and see what shapes happen when you weave pixelstick through the air.
Mashable spoke with McGuigan and Frazier about the technology behind their product and what users can create. Frazier, himself an artist, said that the range of creations makes for a number of possibilities; because you can use Photoshop files, that means you can reproduce an image already in existence or one that you made yourself. Even using a few colors can create some cool results.
"The coolest stuff we've gotten are these ethereal, abstract ribbons," said Frazier. "We're waving lots of colors and gradients around to create these organic designs that are so unique, it'd be almost impossible to get them twice."
You don't have to be an expert in light painting to use the stick, either.
"We found that the actual use of pixelstick is extremely forgiving," said McGuigan. "It's pretty easy to capture [a photo] without too much trial and error."

Users can even load gifs onto the pixelstick by importing an animation into Photoshop. The program then opens the gif as a series of frames which the user can export as a bitmap file. The pixelstick controller can project these images in a sequential way so that each part of the gif is lit up in the correct order. Users simply get the camera ready, step into the frame with the stick and repeat. In that sense, Frazier explains, "a lot of the work is done by the controllers." Users simply need to wear black or dark clothing so they don't appear in the frame.

At the time of writing, the team's Kickstarter campaign had already exceeded its goal. With 28 days still left in the campaign, the team reached $432,013 — more than $300,000 above their original goal of $110,000.
"These are the kind of LED lights you see in storefront displays that run 24/7 for years so they're very sturdy," said Frazier. "They're in that aluminum housing which protects them very well."
That means enough life to create all the awesome photos and animations your creative heart desires.
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Images: Bitbanger Labs