Cheerlights connect your Christmas lights

Create a set of Christmas lights that is connected to the entire world with Cheerlights.

This ingenious project involves you manipulating your Christmas lights to link them up to the Cheerlights system and your Wi-Fi. The upshot of this is that every time someone sends a tweet to @Cheerlights followed by a colour your connected lights will change to that colour.

Even though the manipulation of the lights involves a fair bit of technological know-how and components, the result is that you can be part of an incredible worldwide social project. Plus you’ll have awesome, rapidly changing Christmas lights, which is always fun, right?

Check out the video below for instructions on how to transform your Christmas lights into Cheerlights. You can also visit the Cheerlights website and their Twitter page for more.

To discover other ways the world will be more connected in the future, check out How It Works 67, in which we talk about tomorrow’s world, flying cars, robotic surgeons and augmented-reality contact lenses.

Also, why not check out how the internet has changed our lives in the last 25 years.