How to Make Your Home More Hue-tiful
Want to wake up to the warm lights of sunrise every morning instead of the shocking glare of an alarm clock buzzing in your ear? Sounds pretty heavenly, and is now a reality with Philips’ newest product, Hue.
Hue is a personalized wireless lighting system that lets you control the lights in your house using nothing but your phone. You can turn them on and off, dim them, change their colors and more! Basically, you can go from “daylight” to “rave” all with the push of a button ;) It’s kind of like the Nest, but for lighting rather than air conditioning. It’s also quite similar to LIFX, a Kickstarter project we wrote about a couple of months ago.
The home automation trend just keeps on growing. In fact, now Apple is even embracing it. The company just yesterday announced that they will be selling these color-changing bulbs inside of every store!
Hue, in itself, is a complete lighting system. The starter pack costs $199 and comes with 3 wireless LED bulbs and a Hue Bridge (AKA a central command station for your lights). They also sell the bulbs individually ($60) for those who want to add to their Hueful experience.
More importantly, setting up and using Hue is extremely user friendly. All you have to do is screw in the light bulbs and plug in the Bridge to a router and a power outlet.
After downloading the free app, you’ll be prompted to connect to your lighting system. If you don’t want to connect Hue to your smartphone, you can also go to the Hue website to login, create an account, and control your lights from there.
After that, it’s all about the lights! You can experiment and pick your own ideal lighting, or you can use the preset Philips’ Light Recipes. Light Recipes are preset lighting combinations that are scientifically proven to help you do what you’re doing, but even better! There’s Light Recipes to create better settings to relax, concentrate, energize, and read.
What’s even more interesting is that Philips can recreate lighting from a photo. Say you’re trying to recreate the lighting from a candlelit or lantern-lit ceremony. All you need to do is upload a picture, select the color of the lighting you’re trying to recreate, and voila! There it is. You’re back at the ceremony. Seems like a handy tool to have for those parties when you want to recreate the lighting from last month’s Maroon 5 concert.
Do you think you’re going to purchase Hue? How would you personalize your lighting experience?
