Lightpack – Ambient backlight for your displays | Hacker News Reader

Lightpack – Ambient backlight for your displays

lightpack.tv

152 pointsSkovy43 comments

Some Sony TV's have this ... I like the effect during films, but I don't know why I like it... intuitively it feel like it should reduce the apparent contrast of the picture, but it instead feels like I'm watching a larger screen or that there's more going on in my environment.

I'm going to hypothesise something to do with how brains process our peripheral vision.

Anyway, not sure how much fun it would be to to run it on a monitor that has vim/consoles 90% of the time... maybe it would encourage me to tab certain syntax highlighted code to the far edges of the screen and go wild :)

I like this effect, but not because of changes to the perceived contrast. Often people turn off the lights during movies and this always bothered me because I lose my point of reference. It actually tends to give me nausea to have the only light coming from the TV. Having some sort of light whether its this, a nightlight, or a soft light from a different room tends to prevent this nausea.

> It actually tends to give me nausea to have the only light coming from the TV. Having some sort of light whether its this, a nightlight, or a soft light from a different room tends to prevent this nausea.

Finally, someone else! People always give me strange looks when I complain about this.

Bias lighting is well understood in the professional video industry. Your intuition is spot on. These products, however, do not work like they ought to.

http://www.cinemaquestinc.com/ideal_lume.htm

I suspect this is an effect of our Foveal Vision:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis

We only see things in the centre of the eye crisply and the effective 'resolution' reduces the further away we get from this point. Thus, perhaps, the extra colour is perceived as more screen rather than coloured wall.

These actually increase the apparent contrast you see on the screen. They're especially helpful for LCD panels which have washed-out and uneven black which is very noticeable in a dark room. Having the colours match the picture seems largely a gimmick to me, but having a light surround makes the screen appear "darker". The exact effect it has is hard to measure, and attempts have been ongoing since the 50s. Here's a recent paper: http://www.scopecalc.com/image-contrast-and-surround-illumin...

There are SMPTE specs for exactly how much of what colour light should be used, and we follow them at work, but at home a string of LED fairy lights behind the screen helps a lot ;)

Microsoft Research took the ambient background idea a little further with some cool IllumiRoom demos. [0]

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2w-XqW7bF4

Oh man that looks amazing... It'd be something interesting to follow and see how it goes. Even just watching the video got me excited and curious to see how it all works!

Thanks for sharing.

It's great to see the Philips Ambilight concept democratized (I hope Philips doesn't have any applicable patents here), but the fact that this requires the video source to be a Mac / Windows / Linux PC is going to cut the potential audience way, way down.

I actually made a Standalone version of my own. All it needs is a composite video signal, so you can use it with any type of video source.

that doesn't really help me - I have an HDMI-only home setup - multiple HDMI sources switched by the AV receiver drive a single TV, I'd have to somehow create a parallel composite switch from all the video sources - Bunnie Huang's NeTV can almost do this (and with a nod and a wink one could hack the fpga to do it) so the technology is available to an enterprising hacker - whether you can make a commercial product that does this without licensing HDMI (or licensing and still making it open source) and without getting sued is debatable

All the devices that connect to my TV are HDMI as well. Put a splitter/converter after your AV receiver and you're good.

Reading the site FAQ (http://lightpack.tv/faq), it sounds like the problem with making a "just read the video stream" implementation is the complexity and (surprise, surprise!) prohibitive cost of licenses required to support HDMI...

> (I hope Philips doesn't have any applicable patents here)

I hope the same, but this looks extremely similar to what Philips did with amBX for PCs.

I also know that Philips was headhunting earlier this year for an in-house counsel position centered around pursuing licensing opportunities with companies who might be infringing on their lighting IP.

This one looks similiar:

"Analyze competitors products through reverse engineering efforts to investigate instances of possible third party patent infringement." - http://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/job.htm?jl=869372458&pa...

Jeff Atwood wrote a piece on bias lighting[0] for computer displays. I've been a fan of the idea and have been using the Ikea Dioder[1] colored, also in plain white[2], LED strips mounted behind my monitors both at home and work. It really makes things easier on the eyes when you aren't in a completely pitch-black room, not to mention the color effects are rather soothing. The Ikea strips are easy enough to mount to the back of monitors with a bit of velcro tape.

[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/11/bias-lighting.html [1] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50192365/ [2] http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/20119418/

I have the DIY version [0] of this on the back of my monitor right now, and the effect is quite nice, especially when playing games. The total DIY cost was $30 in components, namely a Teensy 2.0 microcontroller and a WS2801 RGB pixel string from eBay (unfortunately, I don't have nice mounting hardware so they're just stuck in cardboard strips).

[0] http://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy-ambient-tv-lighting/o...

Ack, it looks like a nice product but they need some help with their copywriting.

> "So, you can't use Lightpack with your PlayStation 4 out-of-the-box cause you unable to run Prismatik in SONY ecosystem"

Yea, I agree and I noticed several other errors. As you could tell from the video I believe they are Russian along with other nationalities.

They certainly aren't English speakers. It's a pity because they've a really solid product, just not showing it off well to an international audience. The rest isn't full of mistakes as much as just being informal and inconsistent, I suppose it's quite a difficult language if you're not accustomed to writing it.

Didn't dig much, but the "146% open source" line might be a reference to Putin.[0]

[0]http://gawker.com/5864945/putin-clings-to-victory-as-russias...

interesting product, but really weird/poor choice in demo content at 22s in their video...

The YT link they have on their marketing page (above the video) is even set up to take you to the creepy part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UP7SmUqkxc#t=22

Yikes! Trigger warning: bondage/terrorized young woman.

I've wanted to make my own version for a while, but using a RBP (which I use for my media consumption anyway) was previously a deterrent.

I think you should make a HDCP pass-thru box because the easy of installation and practicality makes it more desirable to consumers (myself included). I have previously written software that breaks HDCP encryption as well as does a slew of other work arounds that other companies -- despite saying they do not -- actually employ to make input switching faster.

If you need to talk to anyone about HDCP let me know; I can either help or get you in touch with some people who can.

Interestingly, the BlinkyTape people also used the Futurama intro to demo a similar use of their product:

http://blinkinlabs.com/ambitape/

Looks brilliant. I've put my email in the preorder form... I'd buy one right now if it was available. I hope they deliver to the UK.

This might be good for a computer screen running full screen images or even HD video running full frame 1.78 content, but what about movies that are at a wider aspect ratio like the common 2.35 that must appear letterboxed? Add this to the fact that an HDMI license seems unreasonable, this doesn't look this will be very viable for non-computer monitor situations.

All this talk about being easy on your eyes, and their body copy is 13px. Typography goes a long way toward easing eye strain.

Exactly how is it protecting my eyes?

The question that didn't get answered for me was "will it work with encrypted HDMI?" one hopes it does use one of the leaked keys and sniffs the stream .... if it does I want one .... otherwise it's not useful for me

I don't believe this works standalone with a TV. It needs an app running on your computer from the looks of it. I'm still waiting for an HDMI pass-through version myself.

I was looking at building one of these a while back for my computer. It seams pretty easy with an Arduino, a $15 roll of RGB LED strip and some computer software. Though going beyond computers, it gets quite complicated.

Adafruit has a tutorial about how to build something similar using an Arduino and set of RGB LED Christmas lights: http://learn.adafruit.com/adalight-diy-ambient-tv-lighting/o...

http://blinkstick.com/ was on here a couple of days ago too, it can be wired in to a Ikea multicolour LED light strip (I forget the name) - their demo video shows it synced to display colours.

Edit: "Dioder".

Simpler solution: Put mirror in front of the TV ;)

I'm just kidding but mirrors in front of the bezels can have some similar effect but probably much weaker then the LEDs.

No mention of the price?

I believe I saw somewhere it was $80

They're finishing up a kickstarter[0], so it might be a while before they take any actual orders from their site

[0] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/woodenshark/lightpack-am...

From the video, they want to to try and get it down to under $50.

I can't get to the site right now to see if lightpack offers anything above simple ambient lighting, but Ikea sells LED light strips for US$30: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/lig...

EDIT: Ah, it's more than simple ambient lighting. In that regard, $50 seems like a great price.

Nice! Ambilight on non-philips tvs

Too bad you need a HTPC..

There's other versions [0] of the same idea that uses a Raspberry Pi and a USB video grabber to do the same thing with any HDMI signal (you only need an HDMI splitter and an HDMI to composite adapter).

[0] https://github.com/gkaindl/ambi-tv

It makes me sad that Philips don't have any Ambilight TV on the US market. Now I'm tempted to order one from Amazon UK and ship it over internationally.

“146% Open Source”

ok.

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