Hardware & Technical What's the easiest way to get interactive RGB room lighting?

[Branithar]

This video looks really cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ8KpcLt9XU

I already have a monitor, so I don't need to spring for an Ambilight TV, just for lights. It looks super cool though.

Logitech has RGB speakers that light up the walls behind them, and match the color on the monitor, but I already have some studio monitors that sound a lot better.

What's the easiest way to get the Ambilight effect, without buying the TV? Are there any cheap solutions that don't take a whole lot of soldering and setup?

 

[Asp Explorer]

There are, or most probably were, USB gaming lights from MadCatz. I don't know if they are still available or if there is driver support from Logitech.

I bought two sets for the lulz. They were incredibly expensive, a massive pain in the backside to setup, a cabling nightmare, and when a windows update arrived it turned them into paperweights that needed setting back up every reboot. I put them in a box and haven't looked at them since.

However, when the silly things worked, they were pretty cool. Here's an ancient video of mine.

https://vimeo.com/115841864

 

[TorTorden_VR]

The way ability works and need is to read the image displayed and generalize what colour the image consist of, and then tune the colour of the LED's accordingly.

To get something similar you will need something to actively read and normalize the image colour. And the only project I have heard of that managed this was complicated as heck, required something in the line of an hd fury to read an HDMI stream, and this cost about $200 alone.
Raspberry to control lights.
And needed a lot of gruelling trouble shooting as well introducing input lag.

In all essence the ability features is a gimmick.
I would much rather just get a couple rgb controlled lights and setup for a fixed colour.
It would get you 80% of what you want.

I also think there could be method using some computer control and scripting to trigger warning modes by reading the journal files.
Like if you run hot the LED's could start blinking red.

 

[Captain Sharky]

You can connect Asus motherboard with Aura lighting to Philips Hue controller. However, it's currenly buggy and limited in options to either some non-interactive programs, music sync and some strange useless stuff like changing room lighting depending on cpu temperature. Nothing like ambilight, that complements on-screen action though.