Playhouse was a large group project (9 people) to use Philips Hue lightbulbs to play animations and interactive games in the windows of buildings. The project was part of our education in a software development course and was made in collaboration with artist Håkan Lidbo.
Philips Hue lightbulbs are capable changing colours in RGB spectrum and can be controlled with an API by sending web requests to the included wireless bridges. The goal was to create animations and simple games such as mastermind and tic-tac-toe that can be played by users in their mobile browser.
We created two web servers written in Python using Tornado. The lamp server controls the lamps directly by sending web requests to the bridges. The second server handles the communication between users and the lamp server. It serves the webpages, communicates actions using websockets, handles game logic and sends commands to the lamp server.
In the fall of 2014 the project continued and we installed it in the newly built NOD building in Kista, as part of its inauguration.