The "Participate" link will load a webpage that allows you to make a light design and send it to Vancouver. The page requires the Google Earth Plug-in which is available for free download from this link http://earth.google.com/plugin/ Once it is installed the page takes up to a couple of minutes to load the first time you run it.

You may select and deselect individual searchlights by clicking on their checkbox or directly on them in the virtual world. You may also select all the searchlights on a building by using the drop down menu. Finally, you may select all, none or invert your current selection by clicking the appropriate buttons.

Click and drag your mouse pointer over the red cross target to change the direction of the selected light beams. Using the height bar you may also change the target's height. The order and disorder buttons change incrementally the current direction of all searchlights. There are a few predetermined patterns —pyramid, grid, zigzag, columns, etc.— that may be applied to selected searchlights.

You may select one of eleven preset camera locations including the point of view of the project's four webcams. This will quickly let you see your design from several perspectives. The "fall" button will bring the camera down to the floor and level the point of view.

The four project cameras can be viewed live through flash streams, visit the “Watch Live” section and download Flash software if necessary.

You can send a design at any time and the system will automatically queue it and show it at night.

There will be a daily first-come first-serve queue. Every 12 seconds a new design is displayed in the sky. The system will estimate when your design will be rendered and also send you an email once your personal webpage documenting your design is made.

The visibility depends on the weather, on a clear night the piece will be seen from a 15Km radius. On an overcast, rainy night the lights will look particularly bright but they won't be seen from very far.

Please read the environmental section of this website.

Sunset Beach, Vanier Park, Burrard Bridge and on a boat or ferry under the lights.

At the bottom of all the pages of the site you can search for a design by its unique ID code. Alternately you can enter any search term, like a name, a location or word, and the system will find any matches in the archive.

No, all comments sent through this system are public and may be read by any visitor. In addition, messages are stored in a permanent public archive so please do not send confidential or private information.

The email addresses are needed in order to notify senders when a design has appeared in the sky. Even though all comments are public the email addresses are NEVER revealed to anyone. You can ensure that we will not give your address to any spammers.

If you receive an email from this project it is because you or someone else entered it while they were sending a design. Please write to info@vectorialvancouver.net if you do not want to receive messages from anybody and we will ensure that no email is ever sent to you.

The site will remain operative and people will still be able to make designs. However, the searchlights will not be operating and thus the system will just show the designs from the archive that are most similar to the submission.

As the project is set-up again in different cities the interface will still be available through address www.alzado.net so please bookmark that page.

The images documenting the first designs sent to the system may be missing. If time allows we will resend these submissions to the queue so that the final documentation is perfect. Please visit your web page in a few days.

Make sure that the Google Earth Plug-in (for Participation) and Flash (for watching live camera streams) are installed in your browser and enabled in the preferences.

The video from the four webcams should update several times a second in high-bandwidth connections (cable, ADSL, etc). This update rate decreases if there is less bandwidth available or if there a lot of traffic to the website.

Depending on the number of designs sent before your submission there may not be enough time for your message to appear. The system will alert you if this is the case and ask you to try again the next day.

Things that affect the performance of your computer include: the processor speed, the connection speed (especially as the programs load textures), the video card and the operating system used. This page has the minimum and ideal configurations needed: http://earth.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=20701

Sometimes the programs fail to load completely into memory. First try to reload the program by clicking on the "refresh" button of your browser. If that doesn't work try emptying the cache (the temporary memory that the browser uses to store frequently accessed documents). To do this visit the "preferences" or "options" settings in your browser and "delete or empty the cache", which is also called "delete temporary Internet files". Once you have done this quit the browser and open it up again...fresh copies of the programs should reload and work perfectly.

We have tested the programs in Windows XP, Vista and 7 and in MacOSX Leopard and Snow Leopard. Supported browsers are Google Chrome 1.0+, Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 3.0+, Flock 1.0+ and Safari 3.1+.