The light-bulb moment for the light

“A beautiful, intelligent, connected light.” is how Sydney’s Moore’s Cloud describes their project: And it does appear to match all those adjectives.

The idea is a prettily-designed light containing 52 LEDs, built-in brains and WiFi connectivity. The result is a light that can be programmed in an amazing range of colours and sequences, that can react to events from a tap to the receipt of an email and that can be controlled from a computer or iPad. Really it’s one of those things that you could do everything with, or nothing depending on your ideas and enthusiasm.

Moore’s Cloud have cleverly, and ambitiously, called their device “Light”. Clearly they’ve set out to make the be-all and end-all of lights – it does just about everything you can imagine a light doing. It’s all open source, so those things the designers haven’t thought of can be created by someone else.

They’ve already raised over $155,000 through their Kickstarter page although there’s a fair way to go to the $700,000 they need by 21 December. $99 in backing funds will get you one of the first Lights to roll off the production lines.

For anyone who is into interior design or wants a simple way to get into the internet of things, this looks like a good deal. Personally, I’m a little concerned that after the first flurry of playing with it I’d find the changing colours annoying and it would just sit in the corner as a standard lamp. Luckily the cool industrial design of Light means even just sitting in the corner glowing away it looks to be worth having.

More details and pretty pictures at their website.