This morning Philips held bit of a shindig down at the Aotea Centre to show off some new toys to the local media. Among the TV’s, headphones, power surge protectors and drag queens (no, really) was a little toy called amBX (am-bee-ex). It’s a PC peripheral targeting gamers that riffs off Philips’ Ambilight technology found in some of their high end LCD TV’s.

Ambilight is a lighting system built into the rear of an LCD TV that changes colour depending on the picture being displayed on screen, the idea being that the human eye sees’s better in a room with a little light than a completely darkened one. I reviewed a couple of these Ambilight tellies when they first appeared and was a little underwhelmed by the whole experience. While the theory of back lighting your television is sound, in practice it proved little more than a gimmick. Will the emergence of amBX for your PC be any different? Probably not.

amBX is basically a speaker system for your PC that attempts to add a tangible element to your gaming experience. I does this by introducing those same Ambilights we talked about earlier but goes a couple of steps further through the addition of two little desk-based fans that blow wind in your face and a fancy wrist pad that vibrates whenever action is occurring in the game you’re playing. Philips had a couple of the things running and while the speakers looked and sounded decent enough there were a few flaws in the rest of the get up. For a start, wrists aren’t the ideal place to sense vibration effects and instead of "feeling" the action it just kind of tickled and felt not entirely dissimilar to a bad case of pins and needles. One imagines that after a long gaming session your hands may actually go numb and fall off.

The little fans however were actually pretty cool. I liked the way they blew wind in my face but this was purely a comfort thing and in this regard I was as happy as dog in car with his head hanging out the window. It didn’t, however, seem to add anything to the actual gaming experience, it was simply too far removed from the on screen action.

As for the lighting — it looked nice and who knows, it may even help me play longer and sooth my pixel-strained eyes. Right now however, all I can see is tingly hands, flashing lights and an extra seven or eight little devices littering my desk and I’m left feeling that the amBX system is just an expensive gimmick ($799 for the Premium bundle).

In spite of all this, Philips should be commended for embracing PC gaming, they’re sponsors of the World Cyber Games and the amBX shows that some real effort is being put in to designing innovative new products for PC gamers — only time will tell if amBX is a success however.