Lighting, blinds & curtains
Manual control? Pah! It’s time to get smart…
ONE OF THE first modern smart home tech products available was Philips Hue smart lighting, and the company has been adding to its collection of smart lights ever since, with a range that includes outdoor lighting, battery–powered lamps, TV light strips and bulbs of every kind.
There are also interesting smart lights from Eve and Nanoleaf, whose normal bulbs are supplemented by fun, colorful lights of various shapes that can produce dynamic decorative illumination in a customized design of your choice.
What’s great about smart lights, bulbs and associated devices — such as smart plugs, remote dimmers, switches and increasingly, smart blinds and curtains — isn’t just that you can control them remotely, via Siri or even by geolocation so they activate when you come home. It’s that you can combine them into scenes.
For example, you can have a scene that features different colors for specific lights, or that uses adaptive lighting to match the colors of daylight as the sunlight moves from cool to warm. And you can even include lighting in your home entertainment; many smart lights can sync with your music, movies or video games (albeit often expensively — a Hue Play HDMI Sync Box and additional TV lightstrip will cost from $500). You can even use smart lights on your Christmas tree.