KitGuru visits Logitech’s G Labs in Switzerland

1. The Building and Ethos2. Keyboards and Romer G Switches3. Keyboard physical stress testing4. The Mice in the basement5. Arx Control and Lighting6. Pro Gamers and Final Thoughts7. View All Pages

Software isn't something Logitech is particullarly known for developing, but of course every peripheral maker needs to have some form of back-end system to manage all of the fancy features of their hardware. Yes you can get a lot of functionality out of Logitech products right off the bat, but the advanced stuff is in the back end.

Take lighting for example. We talked a bit about that earlier, but Logitech wants to take it beyond scrolling rainbows and full set colours. Already the software is able to let you set specific colours for individual and groups of keys, but what is far more impressive is its ability to scan your drive for games and automatically sets up lighting profiles when you launch those games.

In our example we were shown CS GO, which when booted automatically changed the keyboard to light up just the relevant keys for movement, crouching, grenades etc. Logitech is still building many of the profiles, but a lot of popular titles have already been implemented.

But its plans go beyond that. It's actually looking to work with developers to implement even fancier lighting profiles. Like this (artificial) demonstration of how cooldowns in MMOs could be represented with keyboard lighting. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plutn2VR3wc']

In this example the cooldown lighting has all been manually set up by Logitech, so isn't something that will work just yet, but it's ann interesting proof of concept. Logitech wouldn't confirm or deny whether it had begun speaking with Blizzard about it, but it was inferred that it had.

Another neat idea that is much closer to readyness however, was in-game chatting. Hitting the chat key in a game would light up all of the letter keys, giving you a very obviousl visual indicator that you're ready to type. That might seem obvious, but I'm sure we've all hit the chat key accidentally in a game and wondered why nothing is happening. With a visual cue like that, it wouldn't be so perplexing.

Beyond lighting though, Logitech has also been working on something else: Arx Control.

Arx Control gives you the ability to twin your phone or tablet with your PC in a new way, giving you effectively, a second display right in front of you. The initial idea was to give you basic system information on the fly. Media controls? No problem. Peripheral tweaks like sensitivity or polling rate? All doable on the fly from your touch screen.

Launching applications works weell too, as well as loading lighting profiles

But what about going a bit beyond that even? Imagine your League of Legends or DotA 2 minimap being located there? What about your inventory at the touch of your fingers? Or a crafting menu that's a touch away? Personally I was excited by the idea of a Kerbal Space Program docking camera feed, or even an Alien Isolation motion tracker that you could hold up to the screen to activate.

While these are, like the high-level lighting something that we can potentially look forward to in the future, for now Logitech does have some advanced features. Take Arsetto Corsa for example, which has a lot of actionable in-game data, like tyre pressure, temperature, lap times and more. All of that can be shown off on your phone through Arx Controller. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XABhhCyHYEQ']

And it all updates in real time.

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