The Philips Hue lighting system is pretty neat on its own – it lets you control lighting in your house from your iPhone or iPad, adjusting bulb color and brightness remotely via your Wi-Fi network. Ambify is a new app from Stuttgart, Germany-based developer Kai Aras that makes the connected lighting system even cooler, by plugging it into a media player app on the iPhone to automatically generate real-life light shows from your own iTunes library.
Ambify connects to a Hue bridge, and applies algorithms to the audio played back from your library via your own iTunes playlists in order to create real-time visualizations using Hue bulbs, altering color, brightness and the rate of change in time with the beat to create a club-like display without any complicated programming or control systems involved.
The system works with both Philips Hue lightbulbs, and with Living Colors and Living White lamps, when those are connected to the Philips bridge. As you can see in the demo video, depending on how extensive your setup is, the effect can be pretty stunning.
The app is $2.99, which is way cheaper than any other kind of complicated professional sound and light management apps you might get to pull off this kind of display. The Philips Hue isn’t cheap in terms of the cost of getting the base system ($200), but Ambify goes to show that you can do much more with the connected lighting kit than initially meets the eye. A Mac version of Ambify is also planned for release soon.
Just yesterday, Romain covered a Minecraft hack that uses the Hue to mimic the in-game cycle of day and night, in order to provide a more immersive experience. Developers have clearly only begun to scratch the surface of what you can do with Hue, and there’s likely lots more exciting stuff on the horizon.