If you happened to stroll down London’s Regent Street this next Christmas, you may have noticed, just above the festooned storefronts and package-laden shoppers, a series of clusters of glowing translucent globes. If you’d taken a larger look, you would have realized that the globes were pulsating with color, the light emitting diodes (LEDs) within varying their hue and intensity according to the number of passersby , the wind speed, and the amount of sunlight. And if you’d looked really close, you would have discovered the quad-core Xeon computers running customized software that took inputs from people-monitoring video cameras and environmental sensors to precisely choreograph the display.