The light fantastic

You might have seen the Ambilight system found on some Philips TVs, sometimes known as Bias Lighting. If not, the idea is quite simple: a perimeter of RGB LEDs is fixed to the back of the television, and these are light up in correspondence with what’s happening on screen. This has the effect of extending the image onto the walls behind the screen.

There are a number of approaches to recreating this system with open source tools and plugging this into . The most popular is called , which has been around for about as long as Ambilight TVs. is flexible, and a common setup is to running on a device, your PC say, and connected to an HDMI splitter and capture device. The HDMI capture is then sent (over USB) to a Pi running , which drives the LEDs.