You’re being punked whenever you walk into Times Square: The massive billboards assaulting your eyeballs are much higher res closer to ground than they are up top. Engadget discovers this, and other secrets, going “hands on” with Times Square. [Engadget]

Last year, we published the 100 year timeline of the Times Square New Year’s Ball. Now we’ve updated it with Philips’ and New York’s newest, most dazzling time ball ever. (Click image for big version.)

The 2009 New Year’s Ball is 12 feet in diameter and weighs in at 5,386kg. It will blind you with 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDs—that’s roughly triple the 9,576 LEDs that the ball had just last year—shining 16 million possible colours through 2,668 Waterford Crystals.

And despite these barely fathomable numbers, the new ball is 20% more energy efficient than last year’s.

To celebrate the century-old tradition (and appease the tourists), the new ball will stay on display all year long in Times Square. So does that mean we can get drunk and celebrate in the streets all year, too? (Yes, yes it does.) Happy New Year! [Times Square Alliance]

Each side of the sign, designed by D3 LED, requires a 48-drive RAID pumping data at a rate of 3.2GB/second to a custom-built PC. From there, the data is fed through graphics cards to multiple DVI pipes, which lead to six DVI pixel splitters (known as a Spyders). The splitters take video data of a specific resolution and upscale it to the size needed for the display. Once the data is crunched and formatted for the sign, it’s sent out via 4Gbps ethernet to one of more than 12,000 display modules that make up the ginormous billboard.

Each module is a mini-computer, complete with MAC address, redundant 4-gigabit ethernet ports, power supply and a fan. Each panel can report all kinds of vital statistics, including its temperature. If there’s a problem, the panel reports itself to the main computer for easy troubleshooting. (Like a good communist, it can report problems with its neighbours, too.) The majority of the electronics are accessible from inside, so dangerous repair jobs on scaffolding suspended over Times Square are a thing of the past.

The sign’s modules are split into three sections, low-, medium- and high-resolution grids based on their distance from the street. (Why waste pixels for objects way high up?) The top, as you probably guessed, has the largest pixels, at 24mm, while the middle has 12mm and the bottom has 10mm.

The animators are faced with a tough challenge when creating content for the signs, as they must keep the different display sizes in mind so the animation appears cohesive throughout the sections. To help out the animators, sign creator D3 LED made a virtual copy of it that is 10,000 pixels high by 4,000 pixels wide, the equivalent of 43 megapixels. (It’s 20 times the resolution of HD, too.) They use an Adobe After Effects template to help coordinate placement of the animations on the slash-shaped sign.

As previously reported, a single 30-second spot on the billboard requires a staggering 150GB of data transferred through the system. But before you accuse D3 and Walgreens of hogging all of the power in New York, they attest that they are not. With the Con Ed bill in mind, their design reduced unnecessary copper wiring by over 300,000 feet and increased the voltage for more efficient power. They also set up an auto-dimmer (like you might have on your laptop) that adjusts the luminosity of the LEDs based on the ambient light outside. All of this makes it not necessarily cheap but at least cheaper than you’d think to operate.

The Walgreens sign is a complex, fascinating testament to the sheer power of LED displays. While most people living in New York avoid Times Square exactly because of things like this, tourists will undoubtedly flock to the centre to observe the sign up close, even though it can be seen from as far away as Bryant Park and the Port Authority. For now, it’s something that even this semi-jaded NYC resident can appreciate.

113 tonnes in weight, the entire sign spans 4,000 square metres when including vinyl components. That easily trumps the old Times Square champion from NASDAQ, which covered a suddenly modest 1,000 square metres.

Cumulatively, all of this sign will cover three sides of 1 Times Square with a solitary animation. Never has a sale on pantyhose been so grossly over-promoted. [NYTimes via BBGadgets]

Most of us know the Times Square Ball as the symbol of the new year, fresh starts and the last moment of celebration before you puke up cheap champagne. But it’s also an interesting gadget, so to speak, changing with the times alongside consumer trends. So for its 100th birthday, we’ve made a mega timeline (big size after jump) to show the ball through its various tech fashions. And it’s pretty neat. Yes, we just said neat.

The idea of a timeball was actually born in 1832 when Robert Wauchope, a Royal Navy Officer, devised a way for those at sea to sync their marine chronometers (watches) with the shore. A giant ball would drop at a pre-arranged time that could be seen for miles around. Sailors, of course, probably didn’t throw confetti or kiss another in glee (though they were quite possibly drunk). Here’s the rest of our timeball timline in written form.

1904 – Times Square coined.

1907 – The First Ball drops. It’s made of iron, wood, 100 25-watt bulbs…and it’s 700lbs.

1917 – First billboard with moving lights goes up (in Times Square).

1920 – Ball goes 100% iron, nearly 50% lighter at 400lbs.

1927 – Oleg Vladimirovich Losev discovers LED to little fanfare.

1939 – WWII begins.

1942 – Losev dies of hunger.

1942-43 – Ball out for WWII “dimout”, people partied but offered a moment of silence at new year

1951 – Xenon lamps first went on sale in Germany.

1955 – Ball drops to 150lbs. Suck it, Oprah.

1962 – American scientists discover LED.

1976 – Times Square is declared most dangerous area of New York City.

1979 – Disco dies.

1981-88 – Ball becomes an apple for “I Love New York” campaign. Red lights, green stem…subsequent puke colour not specified.

1989 – New Yorkers realize apple ball is stupid, go back to normal design with white lights.

1993 – BMW is the first to use Xenon lights in cars.

2002 – Gizmodo is born.

1993-2003 – Times Square violent crime drops 85%.

1995 – Ball is computerised, aluminumised, covered in rhinestones, and strobe lights.

2000-07 – Ball is made of Waterford crystal, now weighing 1070lbs (which is the heaviest to date, nearly 10 times its weight in the 50s). Lighting includes one 10,000W Xenon lamp and 432 multi-coloured (5 colours) bulbs. Plus it features 144 strobe lights and 92 rotating pyramid mirrors—disco anyone?

2008 – Today we have the same base crystal ball, but it’s been fitted with 9,576 Luxeon LEDs from Philips with 16.7 million programmable colours. Needless to say, that’s a lot more visual variety than the 5 available colours of just a few years back.

Happy New Year everyone!

For more information, check out New York’s own guide and timeline on Times Sqare and this helpful wiki. And a special thanks to our own resident Jesus Diaz, who stayed in for part of his New Year’s celebrations to make us this badass graphic.