After I build my simple POV with 8 red  LEDs, I made this bigger one with 16 bright blue LEDs. With this POV (persistence of vision) patterns can be drawn into "the air".

The LEDs are connected to PORT B of the PIC microcontrollers.

The first LED is bit zero, the second LED bit one and so on.

With the button the pattern can be selected.

I wrote a little tool which converts pictures with a height of 16 pixels into assembly tables for the PICs. I made this because writing tables by hand is not funny.

The assembly source files are included in the ZIP archive on my blog link. The PNG picture to assembly table convertor is included too.

There are two videos on my blog, one of them showing a pac man pattern.