Mandylights expands public participation in Vivid Sydney with interactive lighting platform
Mandylights expands public participation in Vivid Sydney with interactive lighting platform
Mandylights has expanded its role at Vivid Sydney by introducing a new public participation platform that enabled visitors from around the world to contribute their own colour schemes to the festival's city-wide lighting display.
The company's new “Your Connected City” programme, developed in partnership with Destination NSW, was introduced for the 2026 edition of the festival. More than 500 entries were received from 33 countries, with participants selecting buildings, colours and gradients through a bespoke online portal developed by Mandylights' in-house technical team.
The platform was designed to manage submissions from across the globe while maintaining a cohesive visual identity throughout the festival's 23-night run. An internally developed application analysed each submission, identified its dominant colours and grouped similar entries, allowing the creative team to balance colour palettes across the event while ensuring each evening delivered a distinct visual experience.
“One of the hardest things for the team was curating the incoming submissions to ensure that a range of colour palettes were represented every night, so that each night of Vivid felt special,” said Richard Neville, head of creative and CEO at Mandylights.
Behind the scenes, the company also developed an automated workflow to convert curated submissions into lighting cues for the festival. According to Mandylights, the process replaces what would previously have taken days of manual programming, allowing the team to focus on refining the creative outcome.
The city-wide lighting installation is managed from the company's control container, which houses an MA Lighting grandMA3 control system and acts as the operational hub for lighting, media and network infrastructure across the festival. The system connects to a secondary equipment rack on Sydney Harbour Bridge, where Green Hippo media servers drive the bridge's large-scale media playback.
For the 2026 festival, Mandylights also increased its monitoring capability to more than 50,000 live data points covering equipment status, network health and environmental conditions. The monitoring platform is supported by 20 cameras positioned across the city, including the first deployment of the company's latest 4K PTZ camera systems for remote inspection and fault diagnosis.
“Having visibility across the entire network is critical when you're operating a show at this scale,” said Alex Hughes, head of technical design at Mandylights. “The more information we have available in real time, the faster we can respond when something needs attention.”
