Diffuse Laptop Light Makes Screens Easy on the Eyes: Ambif.lux

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.

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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.

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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.

Sit back, relax and check out the Diffuse Team’s website for more on the lamp.

What Would a City Based On Your Foursquare Data Look Like?

What Would a City Based On Your Foursquare Data Look Like?

Most cities evolved based on centuries of complex economic and cultural forces. But what would it look like if that process were reversed? That’s the concept behind Generating Utopia, a program that turns a user’s location-based data into a sprawling, Rio de Janeiro-style cityscape.

Read more…


    



Real Life Luxo, Jr.: I Love Lamp

Remember the classic Pixar animated clip, Luxo, Jr.? You know, the one with the pair of articulating Anglepoise lamps playing around, and shown with the Pixar logo at the beginning of their flicks? Well, in the latest occurrence of life imitating art imitating life, some guys have actually built an animatronic lamp that moves around like the one in the movies.

pinokio luxo lamp

Well, maybe it’s not exactly like the one in the movies – for starters, this lamp is black, and both Luxo, Sr. and Jr. were white. Plus, this lamp is designed to interact with humans, tracking faces and sounds – not bounce around on a little rubber ball. Using custom code, the lamp is able to express a personality in much the same way that the lamps did in the movie.

The robotic lamp, named Pinokio, was created by Victoria University students Shanshan Zhou, Adam Ben-Dror, and Joss Doggett using Processing, Arduino, and OpenCV. If they ever manage to mass-produce these things and then license them through Pixar, they’ll sell millions.

[via TDW via io9]