Razer Chroma Room hands-on: A crazy light show at CES 2018

Razer and Philips teamed up to bring a light show to gamers. They are enhancing the Chroma lighting effects that games produce in your RGB LED keyboard, mouse, mousepad, and other devices. And, in a follow-up to last year’s Project Ariana, they are combining Razer’s Chroma lights with Philips Hue LED lightbulbs. It turns the entire room into a gamer’s disco fantasy.

Razer is synchronizing its Chroma-enabled devices with the Philips Huge Entertainment applications programming interface. So now the entire room lights up with a more immersive gaming experience, where the lights could all turn red suddenly if you get shot in a first-person shooter game.

Developers can submit their own Chroma RGB LED programs to perform lighting combos across the whole room through a third-party store. You can use Razer’s interface to control each light and how it flashes different colors in response to the sounds in the game. It delivers what Razer calls “spatial immersion,” and I got a good taste of it in a demo at CES 2018, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.

You can enjoy the in-game lighting effects when playing Overwatch or Quake Champions, which can take control of the Chroma lighting. Check out the demo of the Chroma-Hue combo in the video.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.