- Your Philips Hue lights are getting a new feature called Hue SpatialAware
- It applies scenes differently depending on the location of lights in a room
- There's also a long-awaited update coming to the Philips Hue Bridge Pro
Your Philips Hue lights are getting an upgrade that's going to make your rooms look a lot more cohesive. It's called Hue SpatialAware, and it will apply lighting scenes differently depending on the location of smart lights within your room, resulting in a more natural-looking effect.
Lighting scenes are palettes of themed colors that you can apply to all the lights in a particular room or area. They're great for setting a mood, but until now each color in the scene could be applied to any light bulb or fixture, regardless of its location. The result could be somewhat jumbled, as you can see on the left-hand side of the images above and below.
That's about to change though, because now you can use your phone's camera to scan your room and log the location of each light. Hue SpatialAware will then apply the colors within your chosen scene in a way that makes sense. For example, the lights on one side of the room might have a bright, warm glow to represent a sunset, while those on the other are darker. You might also find the lights towards the top of your room are brighter than those lower down, simulating a sunny sky.
Hue SpatialAware is currently available for about half the remastered scenes in the Hue app's scene gallery, and is most effective with nature-inspired palettes. It requires Philips Hue Bridge Pro, which went on sale in September last year, and SpatialAware will be available early this year.
More bright ideas
SpatialAware isn't the only new feature rolling out today. Anyone who currently has multiple Philips Hue Bridges will be pleased to learn that they can now port all their lights to a single Bridge Pro. A single Bridge Pro can support over 150 lights and 50 accessories, and you can transfer data from as many Hue Bridges as you like provided you don't exceed those limits.
The Philips Hue AI assistant is getting an upgrade that will let it create automations based on your requests. For example, you can ask it to wake you at a particular time every day, except for Mondays. The assistant is currently only available in English, but support for Dutch, German, and Spanish will arrive over the next few weeks.
There's good news for Apple Home users too. The Hue Secure camera, video doorbell, and contact sensors will soon work seamlessly with Apple's smart home platform, with support for live streaming via picture-in-picture mode on Apple TV, and real-time alerts in the Apple Home app. This will be available very soon as well.
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