FabianIn early January, Philips Hue announced a new feature: SpatialAware. This feature uses a smartphone to scan the lights in a room, recording their exact positions. Based on this data, selected lighting scenes can be perfectly tailored to the room. Above all, this ensures that ceiling lights no longer emit a hodgepodge of colors but instead focus on the white spectrum.
According to the January announcement, SpatialAware is set to launch this spring. As I’ve now learned, the launch is imminent. It might even come with the next app update next week, though I can’t give you a specific date just yet. Today I’d like to address a completely different question: Why will SpatialAware only be available with the new Hue Bridge Pro and not also for the standard Hue Bridge?
After all, the white Hue Bridge also allows you to define the positions of lights. Within Hue Entertainment, you can create multiple zones and manually set the position of up to ten lights there.
The old Hue Bridge is too underpowered for SpatialAware
According to Philips Hue, the old Bridge would reach its resource limits with SpatialAware. “For SpatialAware, each light point receives spatial coordinates that must be stored and calculated by the Bridge—especially when new lights or scenes are added,” says Philips Hue.
But would a few stored coordinates really exceed the Hue Bridge’s capacity? I found that hard to imagine and followed up with Philips Hue again. Apparently, more is happening at the control center than just storing a light point.
“SpatialAware adds sophisticated new algorithms using scanned spatial data we gather during setup. The storage and processing needed to maintain and apply these new techniques on the generated spatial map require the power and storage in the Hue Bridge Pro”, Philips Hue explains in detail.
I’m already curious to see how SpatialAware will work in practice. The first impressions from the demo in January were very promising. If you want to switch to the Hue Bridge Pro in time, you can buy it now at philips-hue.com.
So, in other words: “We could have designed this to run on existing hardware or offload the heavy lifting to your phone, but it’s much more convenient for us if you just buy a new bridge.”