Minecraft Environmental Lighting Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft Environmental Lighting Experiment

blog.taptonics.com

80 pointsrutherfj38 comments

A demonstration of an iPad app that interfaces with the Phillips Hue LED lightbulbs to provide environmental lighting synced with the Minecraft day/night cycle.

Open articleView on HN

This kind of idea is something philips has been working on for years, with Hue being the newest in a line of lighting control systems.

Years ago, they were peddling the amBX line, which was a set of lights, desk vibrators, and fans (yes, as in like, desk fans that blow in your face) that would create an immersive environment for games. Of course, very few games picked it up (we worked on it a bit for Second Life, and I did some silly things with it, super mario bros, and alcohol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kiKE3lif8Q). amBX ended up being mostly a failure, despite having fuck off HUGE booths on the gdc expo floor for at least 3 years running (Who else remembers the huge black blob? Great as a "meet me near [large obvious thing]" place. :) ).

Philips ended up either spinning or selling off amBX. It's still around as a set of crappy LED lights that burn out quickly (?!) and have crap for contrast and color depth. There's open source drivers out there if you look (including my half-done-maybe-still-works libambx).

Hue seems to be working out a bit better from what I'm hearing thus far. Might pick one up myself soon.

I got a secondhand amBX system (just the lights) off of Craigslist a few months ago for cheap and it's been pretty cool. The Windows drivers were a pain to deal with but I got everything up and running in Ubuntu and it works much better.

Interesting issue is that when the power is plugged in for the first time (or the power is reset), the drivers in Ubuntu don't properly link to the device. The lights just flash continuously or don't turn on at all. I have to restart into Windows with the amBX plugged in which I guess does some sort of initialization to them. From there, if I restart back into Ubuntu, everything functions normally.

No issues with burn out so far. There's something pleasing about lighting up my room at night in bright colors. And it gets even better when used as music visualizations!

Hmm, ok, I was seeing the exact same rebooting issue. Didn't realize it was an initialization issue on powerup. Just curious, what drivers/programs are you using to control it on ubuntu?

I haven't delved into the Windows drivers but clearly they're doing something that the Ubuntu ones aren't for this issue to exist. I just noticed it's happening after a "cold boot" of the amBX. I'm just calling it an initialization issue because that's what it seems to me. Just wanted to clear that up first just in case the way I was using "initialization" wasn't clear.

I'm using a combination of boblight, ruby-usb and combustd to get it to work. This isn't my blog but I used this as a guideline to get everything up and running:

http://slickeel.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/philips-ambx-starte...

The tricky thing was realizing I had to have it "initialize" in Windows before this would work.

I don't think there's an official SDK, but the Hue is easy to control with a JSON API. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/in-living-color-ars-r... (under the section "Taking Control").

Correct - there is no official SDK, but a quick search at Github will give you quite a few projects using a variety of languages to choose from.

What dads do with their kids... Love it!

LIFX gets all the love these days but there are actually quite a few other projects along the same lines.

Visualight: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leifp/visualight is another crowdfunded project and is Open Hardware.

Spark Socket: http://www.sparkdevices.com/ takes a slightly different approach and you probably can guess, puts the intelligence in the socket separate from the bulb.

Bluetooth bulb: http://www.blueclickhome.com

Greentech 6LoWPAN based system: http://www.greenwavereality.com/solutions/connected-lighting...

Light by Moore's Cloud: http://moorescloud.com/ - A larger ambient display.

Oh man, I'm proud that these products are finally coming out. I was somewhat involved in the later parts of the standardization process, and this is actually the first time I've seen something I've worked on come to mass market. Looking forward to seeing devices with Ember chips come out.

This will probably break any red stone repeater clocks you have set up. Any kind of messing with time in the game will break them and you have to replace the repeater to fix them, which isn't fun if you've built anything more complex than a blinking light.

He isn't messing with time in the game - he built a separate iPad app that allows the user to calibrate the time manually to that of the minecraft server.

Couldn't the iPad app also emulate a client connected to the server, and only ask for the current time?

That is my next plan!

Possibly useful: https://github.com/superjoe30/node-minecraft-protocol/

Or even https://github.com/superjoe30/mineflayer/

Even easier, you could just write a minecraft server plugin that puts its current server time somewhere for the app to read from. It could be anywhere, really - the plugin could run a webserver, the plugin could put it in a txt file visible online somewhere, etc. Now all the iOS app has to do is cat the time and sync automatically.

As far as I can tell this doesn't interact with time in the game.

Ya, there is no requirement to have to mess around with the time in the game. It can all be done with the separate app.

This is actually pretty impressive. There's lots of practical applications for this as well.

LIFX will be another option for these sorts of projects. It's a Kickstarter project that exploded in popularity and is set to deliver in the next couple of months.

http://lifx.co/

I paid about $90-100 for two globes which makes it a bit cheaper than Hue. I think LIFX also does away with a base station and has some sort of mesh networking between bulbs?

Wasn't there a Kickstarter project floating around earlier that was supposed to have the exact same functionality as this 'Phillips Hue'? Or are they the same?

Different to Hue. I'd just written a comment about LIFX when you posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5341347

LIFX is led by an Australian guy. Their email updates have covered their design process, prototyping in China and so on and they're getting close to delivering the first preorders.

There's a tech blog about how it will all work here: http://lifxtech.blogspot.com.au/

So the chief difference there is price and the WiFi interaction between the bulbs? Is everything else the same between the two products, then? Or does LIFX offer any additional advantage?

Haven't looked into Hue much or used it and obviously haven't used LIFX so someone else might need to chime in.

Hue needing a base station seems a bit annoying to me so that is a pretty key difference. Very keen for the LIFX bulbs to arrive so I can experiment and see what they do. It was a very popular Kickstarter foray, so I'm hoping that a strong community forms from those customers to build all the fun stuff you'd hope to see like music- and game-related applications.

LIFX: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5341347

My eyes teared up reading this; what a great dad!

Building up "brownie points" before he turns into a teenager!

That is very cool! I hadn't yet heard about the Hue but you've got me interested in it now. Great article!

I like the idea, would work well for multiplayer where you can't freeze time just by hitting escape.

This is really cool. It would definitely add to the immersion of the game.

And really good if you like to go underground at night and mine. Then you know when the sun rises!

This game. Who'd've thought that this game could be used to do so much?

Pretty awesome.

wtf do hue bulbs have in them for $90 a bulb.

They are way too expensive IMHO. If I did not have the idea to hack this together with Minecraft, I never would have purchased them.

For $199 you get 3 bulbs and the wireless "hub". Additional bulbs to expand your collection are $59.

I always wanted to do something like this with an Arduino but never got around to it. When I saw the Hue I was pretty excited, until I saw the price tag. $200 for 3 bulbs? I'll pass for now. I'm assuming it's only a matter of time before they become reasonably priced.

They're not quite that expensive, but they're powerful and efficient LED bulbs that will last pretty much forever, and you can wirelessly control them.

They are still rather ridiculously expensive for what they are. Granted, they are worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them, but the margins on them must be eye-poppingly large.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com