By Lookout Staff

March 31, 2016 -- Pacific Park's iconic solar-powered Ferris Wheel on the Santa Monica Pier will get a new, nearly $1 million lighting package in time for its 20th Birthday Celebration May 26, amusement park officials announced Wednesday.

The new lighting package will feature "higher resolution, greater color depth and faster ‘frames per second’ display speed," officials said.

The new lighting on the wheel, which towers 130 feet above the Pacific Ocean “will further enhance the quintessential Southern California theme park and beach experience for our guests and the Santa Monica community,” said Jeff Klocke, Vice President at Pacific Park on the Santa Monica Pier.

New state-of-the-art LED components -- mounted on the Ferris wheel’s structure, including its 40 spokes and hubs -- allow one tri-color LED to replace three of the existing ones, park officials said.

The new lights will also be more efficient than the existing eco-friendly LED lights, which already save 75 percent more energy than the traditional incandescent bulbs used on most Ferris wheels, officials said.

In addition, the new programming and upgrades to the lighting display software will increase imaging speed from 3 to 24 frames per second "to display dynamic, custom, computer-generated lighting entertainment in the evenings," Park officials said.

The new lighting package is produced by Orlando-based Eworks Pro, which introduced the world's first fully computerized LED lighting package Ferris wheel in 2004.
“Electronics technology is continuously advancing," said Lars Koch, vice president at Eworks Pro. "In the past 8 years, microprocessors have gotten much faster, and computer chips get smaller and smaller. LEDs have gotten smaller too and generate more light output than ever."

The latest control technology boosts the old system's eight color combinations to 16.7 million color value combinations, and the the illumination on each of the 40 spokes of the wheel will have 1,960 more pixels more than the old system, Koch said.

“For Pacific Park, this primarily means that will go from 15 pixels to 64 pixels. Therefore, the new lighting package will have 2,560 pixels.”

Eworks Pro installed the current lighting package on Pacific Park's wheel in 2008, replacing the exiting 5,392 incandescent bulbs with 160,000 energy-efficient LED lights.

Pacific Park attracts more than 8 million visitors a year to the Santa Monica Pier, officials said. The park offers 12 amusement rides, 14 midway games, an oceanfront food plaza and beachside retail shops.