Ambient lighting for Minecraft bathes your room in the game’s day-night cycle

After your first session of Minecraft, where you inevitably began playing while it was light out and then realized it had gotten dark out and was close to sunrise again, you probably noticed the game is highly immersive. Though it sports blocky, pixelated graphics and often times adheres to a set of physics that is more closely related to magic than science, Mojang’s construct-’em-up sucks you into the world. Now, though, thanks to Jim Rutherford wanting to make a cool mod for his son, the immersion of Minecraft is leaking out into the real world, right into your bedroom.

Jim and son noticed a commercial for Philip’s Hue, an ambient light bulb that can be controlled through a wireless connection, and were inspired to hook the lights up to Minecraft to have the lights follow the game’s day-night cycle. The goal was to have the lights fade between bright daytime colors, warm sunset colors, then finally shut off during nighttime. Jim purchased a Hue Starter Set, which ran him $199 at an Apple Store, and included 3 LED bulbs, as well as the hub that controls them. If you’re wondering, extra bulbs cost $59. Philips offers a free app that can be downloaded from the App Store, which not only provides controls for the system, but comes with lighting presets as well.

Jim then created his own iPad app to provide central controls for the ambient game lighting. He made the app easy-to-use, making the HUD a visual representation of the Minecraft sun and moon traveling along in the sky. You can drag your finger across the sky in the app, effectively using the sun and moon as a scrubber, changing the time in the game world. This, as is the whole point of the project, changes the lighting coming from the Hue bulbs as well. If you leave the app alone, the lights will simply automatically change as the time cycles in the game.

If you’re a curious developer and want to tinker with Jim’s app, it is open source and available on GitHub. If you’d rather just get right into the ambient lighting goodness, Jim submitted the app to the App Store, and it will hopefully get approved and become available (for free) soon.

Of course, to get the whole rig working, you’ll need to buy some Hue bulbs and the wireless hub, which as we mentioned above, will burn at least a $199 hole in your wallet.