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I present to you "Dynamic Ambient Lighting for Mobile Devices"
The information a normal mobile device can show is limited to its display.
With dynamic ambient lighting, the device now has a new way to show additional information
to the user. In this example, an Android application I
developed called "Public Transportation Locater", the ambient lighting helps the user to locate
nearby public transportation stations. Take this blue spot for example, it represents
a subway station in the direction of the light. Purple spots are bus stations. So as there
are 2 spots on the left, I know I can expect 2 bus stations there.
When I scroll the stations off screen, you can see how the lights start to appear.
There is also a purple spot to the right, so there has to be a bus station there too.
As the spot still hasn't disapperead, I know I can find another station to the right.
You can see the helping effect of the ambient lighting even better when you are zoomed in.
Here I try to navigate to the bus stations to the left again.
As you can see, I do not only know that there are 2 stations to the left, but I can also
locate them very precisly.
Dynamic ambient lighting is of course not limited to the previously shown usage. This
example application called "Call Detector" demonstrates a way to interact with the light.
So here I receive a call. Now if I am preparing food and my hands are wet or dirty, I don't
want to touch the screen. Cleaning my hands would probably take too
long. So instead, I simply touch the red light to reject the call.
If I want to take the call, I can as you have probably guessed, touch the green light.
This will answer the call and turn on the speakerphone, so I can talk freely without
having to pick up the device. Now as you can imagine, there are a lot of
ways to interact with the light. You could use it as a color picker for example,
placing one finger on the light ring around the device where the desired color is,
while selecting the lightness and saturation with your other finger on the display.
Or you could simply use it to show different states of the phone. A download could be visualized
as a growing light area. As the download progresses, the illuminated area gets bigger.
A missed call could be visualized with a smooth red light rotating around the phone. Other
colors could represent an incoming email or a text message.
Games could use the ambient lighting too. Simply imagine playing the classic game "Simon
says" using the lights.
A lot of people asked me how the lights will look like when they are used in the the hand
instead of on a table. So as you can see, you hand will start glowing
in pretty colors, but it is not very practical to hold a phone like this.
When you hold the phone very firmly, you can see that almost no light will pass through
your hand. Here is a view of the backside of the prototype.
You can clearly see the LEDs with the LED drivers. You can also see the 2 foam blocks
that act as distant holders to protect the circuit board.
The prototype hardware consists of 40 RGB LEDs of which every single one can be controlled
individually. This is implemented by using a microcontroller with 14 LED drivers.
Communication with the mobile device, in this case, a HTC Desire, is carried out by using
Bluetooth. 2 Additional proximity sensors allow simple
interactions as shown by the "Call Detector". The prototype is very slim, only adding 6.8mm
to the thickniss of the device, making it unnoticable when looking straight from the
top. You can also see here, that the light aura
is still visible when the phone is a short distance away from the background.
Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed this video about "Dynamic Ambient Lighting
for Mobile Devices".