Philips’ amBX Add Visual Dimension To Surround Gaming

By David Ponce

You know darn well that as long as they keep coming up with stuff to make your gaming experience more enjoyable, you’ll keep buying them Cheetos and drinking them Cokes and generally making yourself into a very productive member of society. Philips knows this, and their Thinking Heads at the “Simplicity Event” want to help you help yourself. One of their projects is the amBX, which adds a visual element to immersive gaming, over the traditional surround sound. Using simple lights placed atop your speakers, the technology can recreate game scenes’ lighting dynamically. So, for instance, let’s say you’re playing a game of Doom III and you’re about to turn to a dark corridor to your right: the lights on the right dim in tune with your movements. Say you’ve escaped prison in some other token prison-escaping game, and the guards shine a beam on you from the left… you guessed it: the lights on the left light up.

The technology is not being marketed yet, but is rather part of a showcase of new technology being developed under the requirement that it be simple. We agree, this is simple. And we wish they’d release it already instead of just teasing us with it.

[Philips Simplicity Event] VIA [SciFi Tech]