One enters the store onto a floating glass-and-concrete bridge lit from underneath with blue, green, and pink neon tubes shining through glass roundels in the concrete. "The concept was to surround the merchandise inside the store with color," says Gregory, whose designs include a three-story acrylic wall that flanks the escalators with a pattern of green, yellow, red, blue, pink, and orange Plexiglas panels backlit with fluorescent lamps.

The interior of the store is colorful, too, with high ceilings, or vaults, on the upper level painted blue on one side of the store and deep yellow, or amber, on the other. Decorative scenery ranges from 14 individually-themed cars on the Ferris wheel to a life-size version of the board game Candyland, animatronic versions of E.T. and T-Rex, a Cabbage Patch Doll adoption center, and a 4,000-sq.-ft. (360 sq. m) Barbie Mansion.

What the public doesn't see is the complex system that controls the lighting. The heart of this system consists of four Entertainment Technology Horizon playback controllers with eight universes of DMX that control 39 different zones in the store. One Horizon unit is attached to the Ferris wheel; the other three are found in racks in a basement room. In the same box with the Horizon PBC on the Ferris wheel is a wireless Ethernet receiver whose transmitter rests on the stationary leg of the wheel.

"This is the most complex control system I've ever worked on," says Robert Bell of Entertainment Technology, who came to New York from Canada to work on the programming. His team included lighting designer Steve Shelley, and programmer Rodd McLaughlin of Prelite NY, as well as Michael Steinberg of Focus Lighting, who supervised system integration. The programmers used wireless laptops or Ethernet jacks placed throughout the store (some programming had been done in advance at the Focus office using Horizon software). The system also receives MIDI cues from the custom Show & Tell show control system, to trigger lighting cues that match the status of the window scrollers.

"There is not just one button to run a show," says Bell. "There is an entire PC-based front end, with Windows applications, to drive the Horizon units which store over 1,000 cue lists, any number of which can be running at the same time." Custom HTML pages, created by Focus Lighting, allow authorized personnel to choose pre-programmed lighting looks and override the ongoing time clock functions. For example, the store manager can go to the control room, key in a password, and go to the access button on the computer screen that represents the area he wants to control. He might want to change the lighting in the Barbie house or change the look and color of the Ferris wheel for a special event in the store.

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