FabianMore than a year after the original announcement, Philips Hue unlocked the new Natural Light feature yesterday. A 24-hour scene that provides the optimal white light throughout the different times of the day. Cool, activating white tones in the morning and relaxed warm white in the evening.
The first big problem: Natural Light can so far only be activated manually in the app. The 24-hour scene cannot yet be placed on accessories such as the dimmer switch or the motion detector. Only the Hue Tap Dial Switch supports the new scene. According to Philips Hue, support for other accessory products will follow in the coming year.
Natural light exclusively for all lamps in the room
Also more than impractical: Unlike a normal scene, Natural Light switches on all lamps in the room or zone. There is no option to exclude certain lamps from the scene. And even worse: If you switch off a lamp after starting the 24-hour scene, the automatic colour change for the whole room is stopped. The only solution: create a new zone for the desired lamps.
It should also be mentioned that the Natural Light scene automatically saves all six scenes used, such as Rest or Concentrate, in the selected room, whether you want it to or not.
For me personally, the new function is still completely unsuitable at the moment. In any case, Philips Hue still has some work to do. What do you think?
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Frederick
For me, more than a natural light thing, the wow effect would be with a “5-scenes dynamic feature”
– 5 scenes entirely customisable
– Can be triggered either with a switch or a sensor
– Each time frame would be dynamic with an offset related to sunset or sunrise (ex : first scene triggered 1h after sunrise, 2nd scene triggered 3 hours after sunrise… and so on)
While this is certainly a welcome feature, I don’t feel very positive about it to be honest. Some find it better than HomeKit Adaptive lighting, but one thing it clearly isn’t is adaptive. It doesn’t make a seamless transition from one hue, or ‘scene’, to the other. In this current implementation it is just an extension of the natural light option on the Dimmer Switch.
Seems like a feature designed to only work well for homes close to the equator 🤦🏻♂️, given that times are fixed and not relative to sunrise/sunset. In places like Northern Europe (and far worse way up north), this light will in fact not be ”natural” most of the year. Too bad, as I was hoping for a fast native way to trigger the ”natural” shade of white from my many Hue Motion Sensors. Guess I’ll have to keep my slow third-party workarounds…
I live in the northern hemisphere, and I agree with you on some level but I think you misunderstood the idea of this.
The idea is to provide the ideal natural lighting conditions for different times of the day. Bright for the mornings to activate and dimmed lights for the evening to start the melatonin production. The idea is not to match the lightning conditions that are outside in the nature at the current time. There are parts where the sun never sets in the summer and never rises in the winter, so what would be the ideal conditions there? Are the lights off the whole winter? Hell no, that’s why we need an artificial way to mimic optimal lighting conditions.
Natural deception!
Long awaited feature an a really poor implementation as others pointed out.
We need to trigger from motion sensor and smart switch.
Also sunrise/sunset with offset is needed.
I will go back to Adaptive Lighting in Home Assistant.
Agree that this isn’t useable like this.
It’s a start, but not a very good one.
It really needs to be donee so that “natural” is a colour that any lamp can be set to as part of any scene. and it needs to be relative to sunrise / sunset etc.
Agreed with the above. The only other thing I would mention is I expected the transitions to be smooth and gradual throughout the course of the day. Instead, the transition happens abruptly precisely at the transition time set. That along with the fact that it doesn’t align to actual sunrise and sunset times at your location makes more a very unnatural “natural light” scene.