As good will spreads through the season, people are getting expressive with more than just paper. Toxi, aka Karsten Schmidt, sends along this Processing-based interactive 3d card: simple but elegant and definitely something different to find in your mailbox.

Postspectacular Xmas

You may need to “trust” the applet for 3D-in-browser, sadly (usually only the first time you run a Java app - but no worries, no actual security risk here). Still, it’s not hard to imagine a day soon where we pop little interactive greetings to each other’s mobiles. Well, not hard for me to imagine, anyway; maybe it’s the glow of this new Blackberry. But thanks to Karsten for all the skill and inspiration he’s offered over this year.

That’s actually not the only interactive card I got. Bubblyfish aka Haeyoung Kim sent an 8-bit holiday card out on her site. Next: a home-built card with homebrew, custom-programmed sound chip and LED array.

Hope everyone’s having lovely holidays. You have just under one week to build your own ball drop.

Kevin of The Nettles has this quandary about music-synchronized Christmas lights:

There’s this Xmas lights video (make sure that you have your sound on): Wizards of Winter [new, better link]
Lots of other video links to crazy Christmas light displays

[Ed: Updated those links; thanks Afro! -PK] Do you happen to know the origins of this video? It looks like the light display was implemented with a MIDI control to a lighting rig but there’s some speculation in the blogosphere that it’s a PC video editing job. I’d be curious to know what kind of rig you’d use for something like this, though not for Xmas lights.

Technical speculation after the jump . . .