[Alan] has been working on driving this WS2811 LED module with an AVR microcontroller. It may look like a standard six-pin RGB LED but it actually contains both an LED module and a microcontroller ...
Sony has announced its next-gen RGB mini-LED TV backlight tech, and from our eyes-on experience it looks like a winner.
A larger matrix like this 16 x 16 x 16 LED build, has a total of 4096. This would be a nightmare to drive with plain RGB LEDs ... there are four power supply modules needed to feed this juice.