Vivaldi can light up your web browsing using Philips Hue lamps

If you're a fan of Philips Ambilight system on TVs, now you can do something similar for your entire room as you browse the web using Vivaldi and some Philips Hue lamps.

Ambee brings animated light scenes to Philips Hue

Want to explore the luminous possibilites the Philips Hue lamp system allows? Then you'll definitely need to try the Ambee app and its amazing animated lighting scenes.

Cheap high power LED lamps

We already know LED lamps are the future, but sometimes it's not easy to find high powered LED lamps at affordable prices. Well... let me give you a hand with it, as there are indeed high power - and cheap - LED lamps out there.

Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus now shine brighter than ever

After adding the LED lightstrips to the Hue familiy, Philips finally answers the most common criticisms and suggestions with its new Philips Hue Lightstrip Plus.

Philips turns LED lights into indoor GPS system

Tired of getting lost inside those big shopping stores trying to find out what you need? If you go to the Carrefour store in Lille, France, you'll know exactly where you are at all times, thanks to the LED lamps from Philips that act as an indoor "GPS".

Philips Hue Go levam as cores a qualquer lado

The Philips Hue family has very recently received the new Hue Phoenix, but there's already a new colorful member that can now be taken anywhere you want: the Hue Go.

Cree's new LED lamp is ZigBee and Wink compatible and costs less than you'd think

If you haven't done it yet, 2015 will certainly be the year you'll finally replace your old light bulbs with LED lamps. And while you're at it, you might as well choose some smarter lamps, like Cree's latest connected LED lamps.

Statement High Quality Lightning Cable

Apple may have simplified its cables and connectors with the Lightning system, but that didn't make their own cables any better. Just like the old ones, they're prone to "desintegrate" under heavy use, in part thanks to the lack of adequate strain-relief protection (because, as it's used to say, adding it would "ruin" the cable's design). But now Statement wants to change that, providing high quality and certified Lightning cables for your Apple devices.

Philips Hue Intelligent LED Lamps on Apple Store

It's kind of sad that nearly two years after promising us intelligent, smartphone controlable, high-efficiency LED lamps with the Android@Home project, Google (and its partners) has so far failed to produce a single lamp.

So, I wasn't too surprised when I saw Apple now has intelligent lamps in their Apple Store. (You can only delay things so much, until someone else jumps in to fill the void).

These aren't Apple lamps, but that's for the best: These are the Philips Hue LED lamps.

Thes Philips Hue are "intelligent" LED lamps that you can control remotely via your iPhone or iPad (an Android App is expected for December).

The starter kit comes with three LED lamps and a ZigBee gateway you connect your home network. As for the lamps, just put them wherever you see fit.
After the initial setup (pressing a button), you'll have remote access to all your Hue lamps, meaning you can dim/brighten them at will, and even change their colors to suit your mood. You can also use preset scenes (or make your own), as well as create timers and scheduled events.

You can even set it to notify you in case someone doesn't turn on a light in a specified time frame: meaning you can receive a notification in case an elderly person did in fact get out of bed - or maybe a sleepy youngster trying not to get to  school on time.

The starter kit costs $199 with the ZigBee gateway and three Hue lamps, and you can buy extra lamps for  $59 each. It isn't cheap, but at least you're buying lamps that are using an open standard that will certainly be helpful in case you want to integrate it in a more powerful home automation system.

Smart Headlights Turns Rain "Invisible"

Although car headlights have evolved a lot in the past decades, going from simple "lamps" to more powerful and efficient Xenon HID lamps, and even LEDs; as well as adaptive lighting systems capable of changing the light beams to adapt to different conditions - there's are still situation where more powerful lighting doesn't really means better visibility for the driver: for instance, when its raining, with the light shining on the water droplets and effectively making it worse.

If you thought that a smart headlight system that was able to light the road but not the falling rain was something only possible in a science fiction novel, you'll be surprised that it's no longer fiction.

This system uses a camera to see the incoming rain and create a lighting pattern that is projected in front of the vehicle so that it keeps the falling rain "in the dark". The results are really amazing, turning an otherwise "wall of water" that blocks your view into something that you'll barely notice.

And we have to consider that using projectors as headlights allows for many other "futuristic" features; such as projecting information on the road itself (for instance, showing safe distance zone, or navigation information), and creating even more evolved adaptive lighting patterns (avoiding the incoming traffic, for instance) than what is currently possible with the traditional systems.

LED Reading Lights for Books

Tablets and eBook readers may be on the rise, but there's still a lot of people out there that are unwilling to let go of their old (and new) paper books. And unlike their digital screen counterparts, when it gets dark... you can't really see whats printed on its pages.

The time of reading holding a flashlight are long gone, and today we have more comfortable ways of reading books during the night like this Philips bok reading LED light which uses light guides technology similar to the ones used on LCD screens, allowing the LEDs placed on the frame to evenly light a larger area.

Unfortunately, its price isn't that cheap (nearly 40 euros) so... here's a similar, but cheaper alternative:

This LED book reading light isn't rechargeable via USB like the Philips above, but costing under 5 euros, I guess most people won't mind that.

Faster Than Light Camera

We all know that there's a secret world going on, invisible to us, on each and every second of our lives. Secrets that can only bee seen through the eyes of eye speed cameras, that reveal that even the most simple things are often more amazing than we could have anticipated.

But, what if we could crank the dial on high speed cameras all the way to... one trillion frames per second?

That's exactly what researchers at MIT have done and their trillion images per second camera is fast enough to stop light itself!

Although this isn't the kind of camera you can expect to replace your digital SLR (it takes over an hour to process the capture of the single nanosecond it takes for light to travel through a bottle) it's still a feat one should be proud of.

Light Tape - Electroluminescent Lighting

I know everyone is talking about LEDs, but that doesn't mean there aren't other kinds of interesting alternatives when it comes to decorative lighting. Check these amazing electroluminescent tapes from Light Tape.

The applications are only bounded by your imagination:



And if you want to know more about it, you have a lot of tutorial videos available:

Seekway 3D LED Cube

It has LEDs. It changes color.

That alone would be enough to interest me; but after seeing it in motion I think everyone will be mesmerized by this 3D LED Cube from Seekway capable of playing 3D motion sequences.

This particular cube is made of 16x16x16 RGB LEDs (that's 4096 LEDs if you don't want to do the math yourself) which - though they look nice on photos - look even better on video:



Seekway is already working on the next models, which will have up to 48x48x48 LEDs (that's over 110 thousand LEDs.)

I'll sure be looking forward to seeing it in action.

via [Gizmodo]