For most of us, adjusting a room’s lighting means either making it light or dark with the flip of a switch. But Japanese researchers have come up with a far more advanced approach that lets you literally paint where you want the light to be using an interactive stylus-driven interface.
A camera mounted to the ceiling feeds a live view of the room to the system’s Photoshop-like interface that’s controlled using a touchscreen Wacom tablet. Users are able to precisely tweak the room’s lighting by painting over the live feed with a white or black brush. Whatever they paint is perfectly recreated in the room by a series of 12 dimmable lights on the ceiling mounted to robotic actuators that reposition them all in real time.
It’s like mood lighting on steroids; all that’s left is figuring out how to integrate interactive candles into the mix.