Natural light (by Larisa-K on Pixabay)
Last year Signify brought many products to the market and added some amazing new updates to the Philips Hue app. To give some examples, you now have the option to sync your music with your Hue lights and let them bounce on the beat. Another newly added great feature is dynamic scenes. Dynamic scenes allow users to “play” a certain scene and gradually change between colors. Unfortunately, the Philips Hue natural daylight simulation is still pending. Yet it was announced back in autumn last year.
As of right now, Philips Hue does not want to give us a specific time frame when we can expect this feature. We will have to sit tight and wait, but what does natural lighting has to offer us?
Natural daylight
Implementing the dynamic scenes in the Philips Hue app was necessary before implementing the natural light. Because the natural light can be seen as an extended dynamic scene. But Instead of looping between the same colors over and over in a short timeframe, it will run selected colors over 24 hours.
The typical light scenes used for the natural light loop will be: Energize, Concentrate, Read, and Relax. The bright cool light scenes are used during the early hours to help you wake up and focus. While the warmer and softer light scenes as Read and Relax can help you wind down for the evening and help your body prepare for sleep. The timing of the different scenes will be dependent on the sunrise and sunset timing.
Hopefully, we will also be able to change the actual settings of the different time slots to adjust them to your preferences.
In the mean time
As we are still waiting on the implementation of natural light within the Philips Hue app an alternative right now could be Apple HomeKit adaptive lighting. Adaptive Lighting in HomeKit is a useful feature for automatically adjusting the lighting.
You wake up with cool colors, so you can start the day focused. During the day the lamp colors are even cooler to stay optimally concentrated and your lighting becomes a lot warmer in the evening to prevent exposure to blue light. The transition to the different shades is completely automatic, so you don’t have to worry about it yourself. An important note for adaptive HomeKit lighting is that it only changes the colors while the brightness remains the same throughout the day.
Sadly as the name already suggests it’s Apple HomeKit adaptive lighting so this feature is not available for android users. If Philips Hue can implement this it will make it easy for Hue users on both Apple and Android devices to use and create.
