The average consumer are willing to pay 30U$ for a collection of streaming service. Streaming Platforms are fighting for relevance and audience. The difference between one another is shrinking. The content itself is not enough to differentiate each platform. Creating distinct experiences is a major path to create relevance and value for the brand. Our Scary Lamp is expanding the barriers of the TV. Creating a 4D experience at home. It’s the first step on bringing true interaction with content.

The way we interact with content had major changes over the past years. Streaming platforms brought a new way of consuming entertainment. Today, we have many platforms to choose from. Many of them more of the same. But what if one of these platforms go beyond? Literally beyond the screen. We decided to open a new path. By using IoT and technology, we created a new immersive way of watching a movie or series at your home.

Introducing Scary Lamp. A series of stylish lamps that reacts to the scary content you are watching. A new immersive experience on watching horror movies and series. It has an Arduino inside its body that receives information from the content and goes on and off, blinks and flickers at exactly the same time it does on the movie. It also has 10 different levels of brightness and reacts with a high precision rate. The Scary Lamp designs are inspired by classic style lamps you find on scary movies. And their shapes also help to place the tech equipment inside.

November 2018 – the idea

February 2020 – The first prototype - Hacking a smart lamp. The first major fail. The Smart Lamp had major latency issues. The time between what happened on the film and the lamp was impracticable.

May 2020 – The first working prototype. But without the Scary Lamp skin. Just a light bulb connected to an Arduino.

July 2020 – The First Lamp was ready to work.

January 2021 – We produced the demo film.

We created an invisible subtitle archive for every content. These subtitles archives are built in the same way regular subtitle archives are built. But instead of letters, we use a code with numbers that goes from 0 to 9, corresponding to the brightness of the light in every tenth of a second. We’ve built a video player app that runs the movie and sends this information through wi-fi to a gadget placed inside the lamp’s body. The small gadget uses an Arduino connected to a Nanoshield Triac module and a Nanoshield Zero Cross module to control the electric current that goes to the light bulb. The light Bulb needs to be dimmer friendly to work. The final cost of the first gadget was R$ 242,33. Around US$ 42. But the cost can be reduced in large scale.

Our goal is to find a streaming partner. We can input this technology in the Streaming Platform’s app and build the invisible subtitles for every scary movie and series in their catalog. The scary lamp can be an asset that differentiates one streaming platforms from the others. We can do promos with the lamps and a big PR campaign over the innovation. The second step is to make this technology possible for everyone by making it work directly with intelligent light bulbs. So, the consumer won’t need to buy a lamp. We had already hacked intelligent light bulbs. It’s possible.