A couple months ago, Philips launched the new Philips hue Personal Wireless Lighting system in Singapore and I AM VERY PSYCHED! I have been looking for multi-color ambient lighting for quite some time now but never got around to getting one. I’m so glad I held out because Philips hue turns out to be really amazing and it’s loaded with so many smart features which are customizable. As a creative, I love customization. I was extremely thrilled to be one of the early few to get my hands on a starter set and play around with it.
Philips hue is a smart LED lightbulb that runs on very low power (a mere 8.5 watt) and has a radio-chip that allows it to connect to a “bridge” via radio frequency, which you then control wirelessly through your mobile device using the Philips hue app.
Philips hue is available online via apple.com.sg, in-store at Philips Home Lighting (Toa Payoh) and selected Apple Premium Resellers. The starter kit comprising of three hue bulbs, a bridge and cables cost S$319. And you can purchase individual hue bulb at S$89 each. A single bulb can connect up to 50 Philips hue bulbs!
Even though I have my geeky side, I am hardly a techie or IT expert. Thankfully the Philips hue is so unbelievably simple to set up, it took me only minutes to do so. All I had to do was connect the bridge to my wireless router using the provided network cable, turn it on and voila! the set up is complete when all the blue lights on the bridge stayed on. Really very easy, because as soon as I got the Philips hue Starter Pack, I was really excited to get it set up immediately and start exploring. Of course you need to have these wireless lightbulbs already screwed in place and powered. And now here comes the cool bit: using the Philips hue app, you can control these wireless lightbulbs. Smart lightbulbs need a smart controller. It’s all at your fingertips!
The Philips hue app has been preloaded with Light Recipes that you can easily select and display shades of white light that have been specified for every day purposes, from warm yellow white to vibrant blue white.
The four “white-light” recipes help you to Relax, Read, Concentrate or Energize.
Shown above: ENERGIZE Light Recipe.
Shown above: CONCENTRATE Light Recipe.
Shown above: READ Light Recipe.
Shown above: RELAX Light Recipe.
But you know, white light is… meh. Why stop at shades of white light when the Philips hue is capable of displaying an amazing range of colors, right? There are Preset Scenes within the app that offers a selection of images Philips have included for you so that you can get a taste of the range of colors Hue is capable of displaying. This is where I get giddy with excitement because I’m not limited to just a handful of colors, unlike other multi-color ambient lighting out there. Using the app, with a Preset Scene loaded, the light colors change accordingly and I can further tweak them by dragging the color picker bubbles around to adjust or completely change the light colors. I can also adjust brightness and saturation.
To kick it up a notch, you can also create a new scene using your own photos from your smart phone’s image library. There’s a broad spectrum of colors to choose from and play around with, I absolutely love the creative possibilities. Just load up a photo from your device’s image library and assign colors using the color picker bubble. Philips hue responds immediately and the lightbulb displays that color.
A quick demo on how I created a new scene using a photo I took.
First, I go into the image library on my smart phone and picked this selfie image as it has a range of colors that I can pick from, to better demo the process.
I assigned a purple color from the image and see below how the Philips hue changed to the color of the purple I picked.
Not feeling purple? Okay, let’s pick a reddish color from the image.
Philips hue changed in real time and displayed a red light.
I thought the red might have been a wee too dark, so I then picked an orange color from the image.
Ah, this I was happy with. It filled my room with a nice cozy warm glow. Really cool, right??? Are you inspired yet?
This personal wireless lighting system is so smart, so fun and can be customized in so many ways, I want to switch out all the lightbulbs in my apartment and install Philips hue in every room. As you can imagine, transforming the ambiance of a room just through colored lighting can completely change the mood of that space. Philips has included other advanced programming functions like the ability to set timed alarms. It also introduces geo-fencing, which will work in conjunction with your smartphone GPS to turn your lights off when you leave your home, and turn them back on when you return.
There’s A LOT more that Philips hue can do and you have to check it out, so please visit http://www.meethue.com to find out more.
I was honored to be invited to give a presentation at the Philips hue Singapore launch to share some of these features. A big thank you to those who came to the launch. I love Philips hue so much that when I was back in New York over the holidays, I bought a starter set for one of my besties from the Apple Store there. I’m planning to buy more bulbs for myself and then pick up a starter set for my sister too.
Philips hue is available online via apple.com.sg, in-store at Philips Home Lighting (Toa Payoh) and selected Apple Premium Resellers. The starter kit comprising of three hue bulbs, a bridge and cables cost S$319. And you can purchase individual hue bulb at S$89 each. A single bulb can connect up to 50 Philips hue bulbs.
I will follow up with another blog post soon on how Philips hue has inspired me to get creative in my apartment. Find out more updates about Philips and Philips hue from http://www.facebook.com/PhilipsLightingSingapore.
