Casper wants you to get a good night’s sleep
Light doesn’t get more fantastic than this clever gizmo
CASPER is a company that’s all about sleep. You may have seen it all over the internet advertising its “revolutionary” mattress – you can try it for 100 nights and send it back if you don’t like it.
It also claims to put good design front and centre, saying that every single element of its mattress has been carefully considered and designed to maximise comfort for the sleeper.
What’s this got to do with technology, you ask?
Well, Casper has not stopped at mattresses in its pursuit of sleep perfection – it’s now making sleep-enhancing gadgets.
The new Casper Glow is a bedside light that, like the mattress, has been re-thought to be the perfect bedroom companion.
By and large, light keeps us awake, so there’s already a problem with that lamp you have by your bed – it’s too bright, it can only be on or off, and the chances are it’s the wrong colour.
And what happens if you have to get up in the night – you have to turn it on at full brightness and that’s not a great help when you want to go back to sleep again.
So, enter Glow – which aims to solve all these problems.
Firstly, it’s connected to an app on your phone, with which you can control things like scheduling on and off times and setting brightness.
But most of the magic happens inside the light itself.
It’s battery powered, for a start, Casper will lull you to sleep, wake you up and light the way if you get up during the night – and it’s all controlled from your phone but sits on a wireless charger – so it never runs out.
Inside are 36 warm LEDs and 12 “accent” LEDs in amber. That allows a variety of warm shades of light depending on what kind of light you want produced.
The whole thing is controlled by gestures.
You turn it on by flipping it over, and the light then begins a 45-minute drift from bright light (bright enough to read) to off, going through a slow dimming and a colour-change to a warmer light. It’s designed to mimic a sunset. You can tap the top to pause the dimming if you want to read for a while longer.
In the night, if you wake and need to get up, a quick shake of the light casts a dim light downwards so you can see where you’re going (you take it with you), allowing you to go and do whatever it is you have to do and get back to sleep with the minimum of disruption (for you and everyone else).
Then, in the morning, at a pre-programmed hour, the Glow will do the reverse of its night-time dimming routine, and wake you gently with a pattern that’s designed to resemble dawn.
And on top of all that, it looks beautiful, too.
It’s reminiscent of an Apple HomePod in shape, albeit a bit smaller –and it looks very much as if the build quality will match Apple’s, too.
What is strange is that the Glow, given its “smart” credentials and smartphone controls, does not work with any of the voice AI assistants out there. So no Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant controls. You have to imagine that’s in the pipeline for future iterations, but for now you are limited to customising night and morning routines with the app.
If you’re a couple, you’ll likely want two, and another neat feature is that you can link them up via Bluetooth and have them operate in sync with each other – in fact, there’s nothing to stop you having more than two to create a spectacular light show around the room.
Nothing to stop you but the price, of course.
A single Casper Glow will set you back £89, which is more than a little pricy for a bedside light, even one this smart. You can get two for £169, which is a saving on buying them separately, but it’s still a lot of money.
If you have trouble sleeping, though, it might well be worth it – you can’t put a price on a good night’s sleep.
■ Find out more at Casper.com. Pre-orders of the Casper Glow will ship by March 5.