In the five years since Philips introduced its Hue range, it's been joined by many other companies offering their own version of its smart lighting. To stay ahead of the competition, the electronics giant has focused on adding platform partners, whil...
Nowadays you can emulate Philips’ Ambilight technology on different TVs or monitors using third–party or custom alternatives. The old Ambilight tech that is. The company recently unveiled an updated version of Ambilight that uses pico-projectors instead of LEDs.
The new system debuts in the AmbiLux, a 65″ 4K LCD TV with nine Ambilight pico-projectors at the back. The projectors are much better than the old Ambilights’ RGB LEDs because they also mimic the overall motion and shape of the objects on-screen, and not just their colors.
According to Gizmodo, you’ll be able to adjust the projectors’ output and sync them with Philips’ Hue lights. Since the AmbiLux is also a smart TV – based on the new Android TV OS – you can use the Ambilight to make a huge ass visual equalizer for your music, whether streaming or from USB.
This is far from the first Philips Ambilightalternative that we’ve seen, but Flytron set its AmbiLED HD apart by making it much easier to install and adjust. That’s because this ambient lighting system for PCs uses a thin strip of LEDs with a reusable adhesive back.
Like many ambient lighting solutions, AmbiLED HD connects to your computer via USB to analyze the colors being displayed on your monitor and emit similar colors.
The difference is that AmbiLED HD sets you free from managing the cords that would otherwise pile up behind your monitor, because its LED strip only needs one three-pin connector for up to 512 LEDs. To put that into context, Flytron was able to frame a 37″ LCD HDTV with 172 LEDs.
Compare the above image with this one and this one and you’ll see how much more convenient the AmbiLED HD is. The LED strip is also flexible and its adhesive is reusable, making it easy to adjust or move the strip to another monitor.
Pledge at least £60 (~$100 USD) on Kickstarter to get an AmbiLED HD kit as a reward. The kit will come with the USB control unit, a power supply, a USB cable and a 3m (~9.8ft.) LED strip. That should be enough to cover a 40″ monitor, but if you want a longer strip just add £1 (~$1.70 USD) for every additional 10cm (approx. 4in.).
Carolina Ferrari, Ilaria Vitali and Mengdi Xu designed Diffuse, a lamp designed to make laptop screens easy on the eyes in two ways. Diffuse can provide complementary ambient light or it can compensate for a dark environment with a soft white light. It’s Ambilight and F.lux in one.
Diffuse consists of a felt diffuser and a wooden box containing its electronics, which are mainly an Arduino Uno, two RGB LED strips and a light sensor. The box also houses a 12v rechargeable battery and a switch between the “Eye Pleasure” and “Eye Relief” modes. The felt diffuser attaches to the box via two magnets.
To use Diffuse, you just connect it to your laptop via its USB cable, turn it on and select which mode you want to use. In Eye Relief mode, Diffuse’s light sensor will analyze the brightness of the area immediately behind your screen. The lamp’s LEDs will then emit a white light to balance the brightness of your screen and your surroundings. To use Eye Pleasure mode you also need to install an application on your laptop. The application will read the average color of your screen in real time and relay it to Diffuse, which will then match the given color.
Philips released 4K TV sets last year, which were large in size and now it 2014 it plans on launching set of smaller sizes. The new series known as the 8809 will include TV screens up to 55 inches in...
Philips makes colorful Hue light bulbs, and it (indirectly) makes colorful Ambilight TVs. Wouldn't it make sense if the two devices talked to each other? They do now: a new Ambilight+Hue app for Android and iOS coordinates Hue bulbs with compatible TVs, spreading Ambilight effects across the entire room. To mark the occasion, Philips and TPVision are launching the 60-inch Elevation TV (not pictured here). The 3D-capable, 1080p LCD introduces a four-sided Ambilight system that produces a fuller lighting effect when the set is wall-mounted. It's also the thinnest Philips TV to date, at 0.54 inches thick, and it includes the requisite smart TV features like Netflix, web browsing and Miracast media sharing. Ambilight+Hue should be available now, although Europeans will have to wait until later in the summer to buy the Elevation for about £2,800 ($4,168).
While Philips did eventually bring its Ambilight technology to PC monitors, it wasn't before others had decided to roll their own. Now you can add ambient backlighting to any computer display without any of the attendant soldering and Arduino-wrangling, thanks to the folks at Woodenshark. The team has built Lightpack, an Ambilight-esque system that'll connect to a Windows, OS X or Linux PC and project the display's colors onto the area surrounding the screen.
Plug the hockey puck-sized device into your computer, attach 10 LED modules to the back of your display and install the open-source software and you're good to go. Once ready, you can even set up custom alerts to measure CPU temperature or email volumes, and even control the lighting with your smartphone or tablet. The team has asked for the unusually specific figure of $261,962 in order to fund an initial production run of 5,000 units, with early backers able to snag one of the units for $50 instead of around $90. Interested to watch it in action? There's a video after the break, friends.
Although the Oculus Rift is one of the more ambitious attempts at making virtual reality accessible, its lack of peripheral version is all too familiar -- it's much like staring into a pair of portholes. Rather than let the disorientation persist unaltered, though, Hack A Day has taken matters into its own hands. Its Oculight hack puts an RGB LED strip inside the headpiece, with the colored lighting set to match the edge of the screen through Adalight code. The result is much like Philips' Ambilight, but arguably more useful: the virtual world's light "leaks" into the wearer's real peripheral view, adding to the immersion. Oculight clearly isn't for sale and needs a refined installation to create the ideal effect, but the readily available resources will let anyone with an Oculus Rift development kit build their own solution.
In the five years since Philips introduced its Hue range, it's been joined by many other companies offering their own version of its smart lighting. To stay ahead of the competition, the electronics giant has focused on adding platform partners, whil...
