What if you could give your living room a home theater feel with lights that change according to the content on the screen?
Philips Hue are smart LED light bulbs that are fully programmable and capable of changing colors. Toon Goggles is a content provider of kid-safe animated and live action programs for children. The two have teamed up so that your Philips Hue light bulbs change color to correspond to the Toon Goggles content. We recently tested the Philips Hue – Toon Goggles integration and wanted to share our experience.
About Philips Hue
In the world of smart homes, Philips Hue is known for being a connected lighting system that can be controlled from smart devices and IoT products. These energy efficient LED lights can be turned on and off with your smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, smart switch, Philips Hue’s own motion sensor. They can be controlled using voice commands issued to your Amazon Echo, Apple HomeKit, and Google Home. They also work with smart home devices like Nest, Samsung SmartThings, and Bosch.
About Toon Goggles
Toon Goggles is one of the over 450 third-party apps that work with Philips Hue with the goal of being able to provide new experiences. As a provider of on-demand entertainment, Toon Goggles content can be viewed on smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, set-top boxes, and online via their website. Toon Goggles’ children’s programming is divided into six categories including boys, girls, comedy, action, preschool, and educational.
How Philips Hue Works with Toon Goggles
According to Toon Goggles, “over 1,000 hours of children’s content has been color analyzed frame-by-frame and enables up to five Philips Hue lights to change color in-sync with the videos you are watching.” This means Toon Goggle’s content can be enhanced when watching in a room illuminated by Philips Hue bulbs on a TV or set top box that supports Toon Goggles (not tablets or mobile devices). This includes TVs from Samsung, Sony, set top boxes from Western Digital Play Media Player and TiVo as well as many others.
We set up our Philips Hue bulbs and gave the content a try on a TiVo Roamio DVD, where Toon Goggles is part of the Opera Store.
The kids grabbed the remote and chose one of the shows. After watching an ad (for Lucky Charms) the content started to play and the overhead lights and floor lamps in our living room immediately started to change.
Our home lights matched the colors on the screen, providing a more immersive viewing environment. Grass on the screen stretched beyond the borders of the television and as the picture changed, the lights in the room did too. Here’s a look at how Philips Hue bulbs changed as we watched Toon Goggles. You’ll also see a close up of the Philips Hue bulbs at work!
We were pretty wowed by the way Philips Hue lights overhead and in our two floor lamps changed with the picture on the screen although the Toon Goggles content left a lot to be desired.
The “vast and diverse amount of animated and live-action programs, engaging games, radio and news” offered in their on-demand format is a far cry from content found on PBS Kids, through curated playlists on YouTube Kids, and the wealth of apps that exist for mobile devices. While kids will click around and watch just about anything, here’s rundown of some of the content on Toon Goggles.
Badanamu Pop Videos— Toddlers and preschoolers will likely be drawn to the pop music that will have them dancing along as while rhyming words pop up on the screen and are highlighted as they’re sung. Beware of the ear worms and Get the Pet Wet, especially if you have household pets. Get the Pet Wet is a song all about dousing your pet with water so don’t be surprised when your child dumps water on the dog and blames it on the show.
The Magic Academy— Preschoolers and early elementary ages can master easy to learn magic tricks like disappearing cup, magic bag, and others by watching Tricky Ricky and his fellow magicians who walk them through the materials needed and provide a how-to so they can wow their friends.
Celebrity Look of the Week— Every week Daphne has a new episode for tweens that features celebrity fashion.
It’s a neat idea that our Philips Hue bulbs work with our television and change color according to the content on the screen. I just wish the content partner had better offerings.
Philips Hue White and Color Ambiance Starter Kit is available from retailers like Best Buy and Amazon for $199.99. Additional bulbs range in price from $29.99-$49.99.
We received a Philips Hue bulbs for testing purposes and I am a member of the #YouTubeParentPanel. No compensation was received for this post and all opinions are my own. Affiliate links are included in this post.
