Programmable poi are one of the most exciting offerings in the world of poi from the past few years.

Being able to see pictures and messages in the trails of poi has been a game changer for performers as well as casual spinners--even resulting in one of the first poi videos to gain more than 1 million views!

One of the most innovative companies making strides in this area is Pyroterra's prop making division Lighttoys and they're now releasing their 4th-generation Visual Poi.

ePoi are Emazing Light’s entry into what I’ve come to think of as the kind of mid-market poi that hover around the $100 dollar mark and meet some or all of the following criteria:

There’s been an influx in the past couple years of a class of LED poi that use a programmable strip of RGB LEDS to create a picture when the poi are spun. The same technology is in use for hoops, levi wands, you name it. In theory, you’re meant to be able to upload clip art or photographs into the poi to create custom programs either for fun or to sync to music for professional purposes.

I’m coming at you today with a review of Ultra Poi--specifically sets you can make up with their Vortex poi sets. There are quite a lot of variations on their hardware you can create, so for the purposes of this review I’m really going to focus on two particular ways of putting their hardware together.

It’s been a year since I did my review of Sunshine Fire Toys’ Solar Flare heads--where does the time go? I promised a follow-up review for them and I am here to deliver. How do Solar Flares stack up over time as compared to other fire poi heads?

Back in September, the folks at Flowtoys gave me a set of the beta version of their new pod poi to try out and evaluate. I've been playing with them ever since and am holding off on a full review till I get the latest version of the hardware and software, but wanted to share my first impressions as well as an interview I had with Sean from Flowtoys back in September.

techblog302.mp4

A couple weeks ago Charlie was kind enough to send me one of the prototypes of his new glow poi at Lanternsmith. They don't work like normal glow poi where you have an LED element with a battery at the end of a tether. Instead you charge them up using some high-powered LEDs and they glow in the dark for several minutes before you recharge them again. Here is a demo of the poi in action as well as some thoughts on their use an efficacy.

techblog246.mp4

Over the weekend, my beloved Flip was stolen from me, so I took it as an opportunity to go try out other cameras in its class to find out which was the best for a poi video blogger to play with. The cameras I compared were the Kodak Playsport (I goofed in the video and referred to it as a Playshare), the Flip HD, and the Sony Bloggie. There's a lot of reviews of these cameras out there, but I thought it would be interesting to approach them from the perspective of a poi spinner rather than the average reviewer.

techblog186.mp4