VOLT + Philips Hue Hackathon

During the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, VOLT organized a Hackathon in collaboration with Philips. The main goal of the event was to explore the possibilities of the Philips Hue, a wireless LED bulb that can be controlled remotely with smartphones or computer applications. The special feature of these hue lamps is that it’s open source and third-party developers are encouraged by Philips to create their own applications.

The way the event was planned was pretty straight to the point: learn how to hack the hue lights and then work on a project in a few hours to present at the end. The projects then would be evaluated by the organizers and the best ones would win Philips Hue kit’s to continue their projects.

Our team was composed by Shinichiro Ito, a design strategist from Japan and Sandro Miccoli, an interactive media developer from Brazil. Our team name is Ducere, a latin verb that means “to lead”.

Sandro and Shin working on the concept! Source

During those hours, we came up with a concept called “Emotional Light”:

The hue lights understand human’s emotion by the face expression and changes their color accordingly. This system can be helpful for those who have diction problems or hearing disability to communicate with non-handicapped people with hue lights.

After prototyping this concept and presenting it we were pleased to get the second place at the Hackathon! The jury felt that this concept has a lot of potential to change the interaction with this kind of media.

VOLT made a blog post about the Hackathon here.

Here it’s possible to see a video of the Hackathon: