Sunsets with Hue lighting should soon feel much more real

Debora Pape

7-1-2026

Translation: machine translated

Instead of uniform lighting, Hue wants to adapt the lighting to your personal room situation. Each light point is controlled individually.

Philips Hue has announced Spatial Aware, a new function for its smart lamps. As the English name suggests, it adapts the lighting to the room in which the lamps are located - taking into account their position in the room and in relation to each other. Previously, the colours of selected scenes were applied to all corresponding light sources without any difference.

The lighting atmosphere adapts to the room

Hue explains that lighting scenes can be displayed naturally and with high precision in the room with Spatial Aware. To do this, the Hue app offers a new function for scanning your home: it uses the camera to measure the room and determine the position of the light points. Using an algorithm, the app then assigns different colour nuances to the lamps in order to display the scene more realistically.

According to Hue, Patial Aware will be compatible with around half of the existing scenes. The supplier states that the new effect was developed for scenes such as «sunset savannah» and «mountain breeze».

So far, all the light points in the sunset scene show the same simultaneous change through red and orange tones. With Spatial Aware, one side of the room is intended to simulate the sun with warm yellow tones, while lamps further away tend to show deeper red. In the scene «Mountain breeze», lights indicate a mountain.

Spatial Aware is therefore intended for users who use several Hue lamps in one room. The function will be rolled out in spring 2026. The catch is that the function is only available for the Bridge Pro, which was introduced in autumn. Anyone still using the earlier Bridge cannot use Spatial Aware.

A step in the right direction

The predefined scenes and effects in the Hue app are still poor compared to the much cheaper lighting system from Govee. Although Hue offers a huge number of curated colour palettes, there is a lack of options for dynamic display - i.e. colour changes and animations. Govee, on the other hand, offers more than 100 dynamic scenes, depending on the device.

Matching effects to the installation situation is also nothing new for Govee: the Chinese company presented a light chain that offers shape mapping back in 2024. The app uses the smartphone camera to analyse how exactly a string of lights is wrapped around the Christmas tree and adjusts the lighting effects accordingly.

The fact that Hue is now introducing a function for spatial light display with Spatial Aware is an exciting new feature.

Apple Home with Hue Secure, migration of multiple Bridges and AI Assistant in German

The company also announced further news. In the first quarter of the year, users will also be able to use Hue Secure devices such as cameras and video doorbells in Apple Home. This makes it possible to view the live video feed from the Hue security camera in the Apple Home app and receive push notifications.

If you have several Bridge V2 devices in operation and are therefore reluctant to switch to the Bridge Pro, you now have one less hurdle to overcome. The Bridge Pro now supports the migration of multiple Bridges - as long as it has sufficient capacity. It can manage up to 150 lamps and more than 50 accessories.

The AI assistant in the Hue app can now help you create automations. According to Hue, it can understand prompts such as «Wake me up every day at 6:45 am, except Wednesdays» and implement them as automations. It will also soon be able to understand requests in German.

The press release from Signify, the supplier of the Hue brand, can be found here.

Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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