Industry Patents

Methods and apparatus for facilitating a process of designing, selecting, and/or customizing lighting effects or lighting shows. A library of indexed (tagged) predefined lighting effects or shows is searched by a search engine, based upon information provided by a user/designer, to identify a set of effects or shows having attributes that are in some way related to the information provided by the user. The user is then presented with search results, i.e., a manageable subset of intelligently chosen lighting effects or shows, which may be ranked in terms of relevance, any one or more of which may be readily selected by the user. The user may select one or more effects or shows from the search results "as is" for execution by a lighting system, may combine one or more effects or shows from the search results, or may modify one or more effects or shows from the search results to refine some aspect of the effect(s)/show(s) in accordance with user preferences. In one exemplary implementation, the library of lighting effects/shows and/or the search engine may be hosted by a web site and accessible via the Internet.