Internet-connected devices like the Hue products from Philips are great fun to play with. The light bulbs offer a developer friendly Software Developer Kit (SDK) that you can use to control from your own software. It just takes a few lines of code to turn lights on or off, or give them a fancy color.
At Mirabeau we combined our face and image recognition skills to color our coffee corner.
How it works
We attached a tiny Raspberry Pi computer in our coffee corner and equipped it with a PiCam - a custom webcam for Raspberry Pi’s - and a small screen. The Raspberry Pi processes the webcam frames using face recognition and determines the location of visible faces. Next we calculate the estimated location of your t-shirt based on the face location. The average color of the t-shirt region is now computed and uses the Philips Hue SDK to change the color of the lights to your t-shirt color. Easy and fun!