Decorative LED cube - GIF

[schuylergrace]

I'm not sure about that. Pause the video between the 0 and 3 second mark. I don't see any horizontal wires at all. If you look close there are only vertical wires on the clear plastic. Also if you were scanning that many RGB LEDs it would be extremely difficult to PWM all the lights correctly to get different colors.

I think it's something like a bunch of WS2812B or SK9822 strips adhered to acrylic or polycarbonate sheets. If I were building it that's what I'd do. You can just peel the adhesive backer off the LED strips and stick them to the plastic. Everything's done for you and you don't have to run wires. Then you only need common power and two data wires off the bottom of each strip (in the base). It's still a bunch of wiring, but it's not 4096 wires in a full blown matrix.

Edit: For a matrix you'd need 12288 wires, not 4096. Whoopsie. For addressable strips you'd need 512 wires and each strip would be connected to a common power and ground.

There aren't any horizontal wires from that angle. The panels are each standalone, so each panel is a flat matrix of LEDs with interconnections between the panels hidden in the base. Here's a video showing how that one was made. It may not be the simplest way, but it worked. And I've been thinking about using very small form factor addressable LEDs to make one of these with thin wires making the interconnects, instead of tape. It would still be a nightmare to build, but less work than what he went through.