RAZER’s Project Ariana Pushes Ambient Lighting Immersion To A New Level

Over the years, RAZER has become famous for its Chroma brand, a technology whose idea was to use PC Gaming accessories lighting capabilities to improve the informational awareness or peripheral vision immersion of gamers. With Project Ariana, RAZER takes the concept to a new level, going from “desk lighting” to “full room lighting” immersion.

The premise of Project Ariana could remind you of Microsoft Research’s Illumiroom, or the idea to use a 3D scanning sweep of the room (or gaming area) and a projector to extend the game immersion outside the monitor or TV.

RAZER’s Project Ariana has a sub-element of that: it would be able to scan the full room and also uses a projector. However, it can also use smart lighting fixtures, along with today’s RGB lighting from Chroma gaming monitors, keyboards, mice and PC towers.

The end game is to use all of these lighting or imaging devices to immerse the player in the game’s lighting universe. For example, if there’s an explosion on the right side of the player, one of the room’s light fixture could briefly turn on. Because these are RGB smart lights, they can emulate millions of different color hues and brightness levels.

In theory, if you add enough of them, you start being able to render a diffuse version of the virtual world’s lighting into your playroom. Add more, and you increase the resolution of that diffuse lighting.

As far as what we’ve seen from the projector usage, it is not there to “extend” your peripheral vision but to reinforce the ambient lighting immersion within the player’s field of view. It uses a frame of the game and projects a blown up version of it, to give the room the same lighting ambiance than the game has (this assumes that you’re playing in a dimly lit room).

Project Ariana is a neat idea, and in theory, there shouldn’t be a hard limit to how many lights or imaging devices Chroma could eventually use. Expect this to start with reasonable numbers, but if that catches on, who knows where this would lead us.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Gaming
Tags: CES, CES 2017, Razer