“An Uber for illuminations.”
A British inventor living in Japan has decided to spread Christmas cheer in a rather unusual way this year. Dressed up as a Christmas tree, complete with flashing lights and decorations, Joseph Tame is turning more than just a couple heads throughout Tokyo’s streets, sidewalks, stores, train stations, and even in the back of its pulled rickshaws.
The aptly named Running Christmas Tree costume consists of an aluminum frame wrapped with a pair of backpacks, each stuffed with branches from two fake trees. The attention-grabbing getup — which took two months to build — is equipped with 99 batteries, 1,500 LEDs, 100 feet of wiring, nine microcontrollers (a combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pis), three onboard cameras, as well as a built-in library of 153 Christmas songs. From the looks of the video below, he is even wearing some slick Adafruit Firewalker-like kicks.
Tame says he is taking bookings for personal appearances in the suit, which he is billing as an “Uber for illuminations.”
“The tree is available on-demand via your smartphone using the links below, and from Dec 26th 2015 via our new iOS app. The tree can come to you wherever you are in the world, but please note that depending on your location it may take a bit of time to reach you; with a combined weight of 93kg (68kg of Joseph + 25kg of Tree) it is currently too heavy for delivery by drone, and is not yet available from Amazon Prime due to there only being one of him,” its creator explains.
See the costume in action below!
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