What is the Ultimate Holiday Tree?

The Ultimate Holiday Tree™ is a tree-shaped flat panel holiday lighting display illuminated with 1,000s of solid-state LED bulbs. It is designed to deliver bright lighting effects, colorful moving patterns, and super large text messages that celebrate the holiday season.

The tree was unique and impressive enough that it was a featured lighting display on HGTV's "All Out Christmas" show.

The Ultimate Holiday Tree started out life as a proof-of-concept idea. I am one of the founders of LightWild, a company that does architectural LED lighting. And I'm also a huge fan of Christmas. We wanted to see if we could create a Christmas display out of three common shapes that we could combine to build any size tree from 8 feet up to 100 feet tall.

The final design consists of a rectangle, and left and right triangles. These can be put together like Lego's to build any size Christmas tree you want. You can see from the pictures how these three basic building blocks are assembled to create the tree.

There are 760 LED pixels (14,440 individual LED's) in the 20' Ultimate Tree. Each pixel contains 19 LED's. There are Red, Green, and Blue LED's mixed in each pixel. Much like a television screen, varying the brightness of each color lets your eye perceive any one of about 65,000 colors. Inside the Christmas tree are over 90 microprocessors all working together to produce the images.

When all the pixels are turned on this unique holiday display outputs the equivalent light of 550 one-hundred watt light bulbs (that's 55,000 watts!) But since LED's are solid state, the entire tree can be run off a single 20 amp circuit and is cool to the touch. By comparison, the 550 one-hundred watt light bulbs would require almost thirty 20-amp circuits.

Although the tree is tall, it doesn't cover a lot of real estate. Its flat panel design (about 5 inches deep without framing) allows it to be used in areas that traditional Christmas trees cannot.

The Christmas show consists of twelve Christmas songs with patterns and images synchronized to the music. The Christmas music is broadcast from a low-power FM transmitter so you can listen to the music on your FM radio in the comfort of your car while watching the show. There are also LED lights on the house and trees that are synchronized as part of the show.

It was an enjoyable project to undertake, and a good technology demonstration for our company. When it turns on it is unlike any other holiday display you've ever seen before. I hope you get to see it in person. If not there are some videos on the web site that give you some idea of how amazing it is.