Sydney, Australia typically puts on quite the fireworks spectacle as part of their New Year's Eve celebration each year. But as event coordinators prepare to ring in 2013, they're hoping to supplement the aerial show with some help from those in attendance.
The city partnered with Telstra, an Australian wireless provider, to create a mobile phone app designed to be used during the fireworks display around Sydney Harbor. Officials are encouraging attendees to arrive early and find a good spot to watch the show. There will be four designated times during the display where they will ask the audience to run the app and hold their phones high in the sky.
The app, available now for Android and iOS handsets, will flash colors and patterns as part of a timed sequence alongside the fireworks display. This interactive synchronized event may be tough to pull off considering there could be upwards of a million people at the event but even if just a fraction of the crowd gets involved, odds are that it will look really cool.
This isn't the first time that synchronized light sources have been used in such a manner. Coldplay handed out special LED wristbands as part of their Mylo Xyloto tour that flashed alongside the band's music. As you can see from the video above, the effects were pretty amazing considering it's such a simple technology. It kind of makes you wonder why something like this hadn't been thought of or tried before.