Philips Hues for a disco office

Once upon a time, a good friend shared with us about Phillips Hue. At that point we were indecisive about how to decorate the new office with fun and modern lighting concept. The moment we saw the promotional video, we immediately knew that we need to get a bunch of these. It’s because the ability of Hue to change to different colours instantly and it can be controlled by mobile apps, wirelessly!

Even better than what we expected, SDK is provided for developer. That means we can even make our own mobile app to play with it. For all the geeks at SSS, that’s priceless …

Ordering Hue was tricky. We could only get it from US or Europe or Australia. Priced at US$200 for a set of 3 bulbs + a station control and US$60 or individual bulb in Amazon, our new office needed a total of 15 bulbs to fill up. Hue for lighting was put into renovation plan, and of course we needed to ship these bad-ass to Saigon before the office ready.

Eventually we got these guys right before the renovation finished and with help from an expert in lighting, we got a super nice lighting layout as well as decoration.

And this is the final result: watch and be envy ;)

However, we are not really satisfied with the current official Philips Hue app because:

• Having a lot of bulbs, it’s difficult to locate the bulbs. We are naming the bulbs on specific locations (like above Son head ..) but it’s not at all intuitive. Especially when we need to be creative to use the whole layout for a specific color arrangement
• There is no pre-defined theme that is useful enough
• It’s slow and unstable

That’s why our mobile team is building the new app based on provided SDK to provide a much better experience for Hue users. This is also to “scratch our own itch”, so it’s not just a project, it’s a way to have fun too!

Philips Hues inside office

Philips Hue from the outside

 You are welcomed to come over to play with our Hue, just ping us on our Facebook page.