Asus Brings ROG RGB Oddities To CES 2018

LAS VEGAS, NV -- At CES 2018, Asus announced a trio of ROG oddities and novelties: the ROG Aura Terminal lighting controller, the Bezel-Free kit, and the ROG Spotlight.

Asus Expands Aura Capabilities With ROG Aura Terminal And Aura SDK

The Aura Terminal is Asus’ new standalone RGB-lighting controller. Its headlining feature is the ability to enable back glow for your monitor. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this, as the idea seems to pop up from time to time but never gains traction. Sometimes referred to as bias lighting, the idea is to have the back of your monitor, which is presumably facing a wall, glow with some color associated to what’s on the screen.

Asus says the Aura Terminal can be used to create bias lighting that responds to the color of the pixels at the edge of the screen. We don’t yet know how it does this, but we do know that it can accommodate four LED strips to cover each side of the monitor. The Aura Terminal will need some way to sample the contents of the screen, but having to pass a video signal to it seems to be quite a hassle. Perhaps it’s handled through USB with some background software. There’s a lot of unknowns about the Aura Terminal at the moment because its capabilities seem to exceed what could be easily programmed by a user.

Perhaps that’s why Asus also highlighted the availability of the Aura SDK alongside the Aura Terminal announcement. Released earlier in the year, Asus will be showcasing various partner creations made with the SDK at CES 2018. Hopefully we’ll find out more about how to leverage the Aura Terminal at CES 2018.

Asus Announces Bezel-Free Kit And Aura Spotlight

Perhaps the most innovative of Asus’ CES 2018 announcements is the Bezel-Free kit, a set of glass contraptions that fit over the gaps between two monitors. The purpose of the contraptions is hide the bezel by distorting the image at the edge of the monitors to create the appearance of a single screen.

The last of Asus’ oddities, the ROG Spotlight, is truly a novelty. The magnetically attachable RGB-led lamp projects the Asus ROG logo and only the Asus ROG logo. It’s Aura-sync enabled, so it’ll fit in perfectly alongside the ROG logos already on your ROG monitor, keyboard, mouse, GPU, and motherboard.