Smart Lighting
To get a real mood going when you’re playing, you need to bring on the atmospheric lighting. And these days, lighting can get way more atmospheric than you’d think.
Customisable RGB lighting is nothing new to gaming, but we’re not talking glowing keyboards here: bigger smart lighting can do some very cool stuff with the overall tone of your room. At the simplest level you can use smart bulbs to dim the lights when you’re playing, or give the room a moody hue. But if you get more into it, you can have the lighting around the room react to what’s happening on the screen in real time.
Our pick of the smart lighting to choose is Philips Hue (£129.99, philips-hue.com), because it’s the most flexible system in terms of types of lighting available, and is the only one that does everything we want it to. The key part for our PS5 setup is the Philips Hue Play Sync box, which plugs into your TV, and you plug your console (and anything you want the lights to react to) into the Sync box. The box analyses the signal as it passes through, and can then change your lights so their colours match what’s happening on-screen. The single most effective way to use this is to get the Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip, which is a long, flexible cable of lights, which you stick to the back of your TV, along the top and sides. It spreads light onto the wall just around your TV, and matches that to what’s happening with an accuracy that’s kind of weird. In grassy areas, it’ll show green on the lower sides, and blue out the top. An explosion in the corner will cause that section only to flash orange.
If you don’t fancy the lightstrip, you can go with the Hue Play Light Bar, which is an uplighter lamp – pop one either side of your TV to make the whole wall shift hues to match the game. Or use any of the other Philips Hue lights in whatever setup fits your room – they all work with the Sync Box. It’s a lot of fun, it looks fantastic, and it makes your TV feel even bigger and more immersive.
Controllable lighting might even help you perform better when you’re playing games, too: a lot of lighting options will have a mode called something like ‘concentration’ or ‘focus’ or ‘energise’, which will simulate the light temperature of sunlight (which is toned slightly blue, despite what most people would probably assume) rather than the yellow-toned light that most normal bulbs give out. Sunlight-mimicking lights are commonly used for wake-up lights because they’ve been shown in studies to help people feel alert and focussed, so why not borrow some of that allnatural light-induced boost for when you’re playing online?
“A LOT OF LIGHTING OPTIONS WILL HAVE A MODE CALLED SOMETHING LIKE ‘CONCENTRATION’.”