Amsterdam, Netherlands – Indie Developer, Erwin Zwart today is proud to announce the worldwide launch of Hue Camera for Philips Hue, a new iOS app that uses the device’s built-in camera to change the colour of Philips Hue smart lightbulbs to the colour that corresponds to content on TV. This Ambilight-like effect is achieved by continuously analysing the colours and determining the most important color using a custom build algorithm.

The custom build algorithm is the heart of Hue Camera. “Simply taking the average color of all captured pixels will not correctly represent the ambiance,” Zwart explains. “The average movie scene contains a lot of different colours, so using the average colour will likely result in a greyish color.” The algorithm build for Hue Camera continuously analyses all individual pixels and takes hue, saturation, luminance, occurrence and many more factors into consideration to determine which specific colour is the most contributing to the overall ambiance.

Because Hue Camera uses the built-in camera, it’s not limited to a specific device and can be used with Apple TV, gaming consoles, BluRay/DVD players and even things off-screen like photos and paintings. Although Hue Camera was designed to work within a wide range of situations, users can change the speed of colour transitions and the intensity of the colour to their liking.

Device Requirements:
* iPhone, iPad and iPod touch
* Integrated camera
* iOS 7.0 or later
* 3.93 MB

Other Requirements:
* One or more Philips Hue lightbulbs and at least one Hue Bridge

Pricing and Availability:
Hue Camera 1.0 is available worldwide on the iOS App Store for $3.99 (USD) in the Utilities category. A limited number of Promotional Codes are available to members of the media. Journalists interested in receiving one can contact Erwin Zwart.

Hue Camera 1.0
Purchase and Download
YouTube Video (Demo)
Technical Article About Hue Camera’s Algorithm
Screenshot
App Icon

Erwin Zwart is a fulltime iOS developer based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for The Capitals by day, and is developing independent iOS apps by night. Copyright (C) 2015 Erwin Zwart. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.