Color-changing lights are a lot of fun, but it can be hard to figure out how to best use them in your home. Most smart lighting companies offer pre-designed scenes to help illuminate your space, but the lights don’t know where they are physically in your home, and the impact may be minimal. Philips Hue has a solution to this problem: SpatialAware.
SpatialAware knows the layout of your room and the location of your Hue lights, so it can determine the best way to deliver colors and effects to the scene.
It gets data when you scan your location with your smartphone in the Hue app. Using your phone’s AR capabilities, the system can create a 3D model of the location of Hue lights in your room.
This is then stored as a map in the Hue app, and when you apply one of Hue’s newly remastered scenes, it will intelligently distribute light based on where the bulbs and fixtures are.
So, for a sunset scene, for example, lamps on one side of the room will feature warm yellow tones to mimic the setting sun, while ceiling lights on the opposite side will have darker tones and colors.
The company has reworked about half of its scenes to be compatible with the new technology, coding each one to adapt to the new data on lighting conditions.
I saw a demo of SpatialAware in a hotel suite at CES this week, and it made me realize I’ve been using smart lighting wrong all along.
The demo, held in a dining room filled with Hue ambient lighting products and Hue bulbs in overhead can lighting, showed the original scene, then the recreated scene.
As you can see in the video above, the lighting is distributed in a more refined and integrated way in the remastered version. “That’s because it’s actually being done the way the lighting designer intended,” says George Yianni, CTO and founder of Philips Hue.
The most noticeable difference is that the colors are more evenly distributed. For example, all the ceiling lights in the recreated Savannah sunset scene have a light orange glow, whereas in the original, some are orange and some are soft white, creating a strange look.
In the nightlight scene, the ceiling lights are on in the original version, but the remastered turns them all off, “because you don’t want ceiling lights in a nightlight scene,” says Yianni.
The new feature is coming in Spring 2026 and is compatible with Hue lighting connected to the Hue Bridge Pro.
Photos and video by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge
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