If you’re reading this article, it’s likely that you spend more than half your day focused on some kind of screen – be it a computer, smartphone, tablet, or camera. All that staring, no matter how fine the pixels are, can be tiresome on the eyes. Which is why Woodenshark has decided to build a backlighting system to extend your screen’s colors onto the walls, providing a softer way to ease your eyes into the display.
If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because it’s Woodenshark isn’t the first company to coin the system. In 2002, Philips unveiled a line of television that featured an “Ambilight” screen that essentially does the same colorful expansion. Unfortunately, Philips is not exactly a leader in the home television market, and the line never quite took off. Instead, others, like Woodenshark, have adopted the tech by making it separate from the TV, thus allowing the system to be attached onto any display.
The system, Lightpack, is a hockey puck-sized accessory that plugs into a power source and USB connection. Users can set up with an included open-source software and attach 10 LED light strips on the borders of the monitor. Now, the display is ready for some ambient lightshow. “The software analyzes what you currently have on the screen, be it a movie, a game, or anything else, and sends this information to the Lightpack device which in turn lightens the surface behind the screen with matching colors using the RGB-LEDs available within the Lightpack device,” Woodenshark explains on the Lightpack Kickstarter. This color expansion helps eyes adjust to constantly changing color levels, especially when you’re watching media in a dark room.
Once set up, the user can also control the LED lights from their mobile device. Outside of its lightshow capabilities, Lightpack can be customized to send colorful alerts based on various hardware and Web notifications – such as blue glows for new Facebook messages, red for overheating CPU levels, or yellow for unread e-mails. Since the software that comes with is open-source, users can dabble with programming their own alerts as well.
Help fund Lightpack on Kickstarter and you can own the system for $80 – $10 bucks off the suggested retail price of $90. Woodenshark expects to ship these home theater accessories in July – just in time for blockbuster season.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.