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The latest addition to the Philips Hue Smart Lighting System is a small black box that synchronizes a light-flooded room with anything that happens on your TV. Games, movies, media streams or anything you watch can pass through the box, which will permanently adjust the color and brightness. of your lights to match, theoretically creating a more immersive experience.
It definitely works – during a demo last month, I was able to watch a room filled with lights shine and sparkle with the trailer Avengers: End of the game, the colors change quickly to reflect what is displayed on the screen. It was a neat effect, and I can imagine that it would work well with some experiments, like games or a horror movie.
But the trailer also showed how this effect could become very tiring. Because a trailer is fast and filled with fast cuts, the headlights changed constantly, to an almost disorienting degree. This will not happen in the majority of TV shows or movies, but if you leave the device turned on while, for example, commercials are broadcast, I can imagine that it is quickly becoming tiring. (I watched with the lighting set to "intense mode", the "subtle" mode of the system may have provided a less shocking effect.Light effects can also be turned off.)
The device, called the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, is placed between your TV and all the gadgets you plug in, such as a Blu-ray player, game console or streaming box. All these HDMI connections then go through Hue Play, which transmits the video signal to your TV while analyzing the color to send it to your lights. Signify, which manufactures the Hue system, says that there should be no latency issues even for gaming.
However, if you are particularly interested in home theater, you may not want to participate. The device supports 4K 60Hz and HDR10 at launch, but it does not support HDR10 + or Dolby Vision, two key standards for superior image quality.
For years, synchronizing the lights with what's on your TV is a dream for the creators of Hue. In 2014, an integration with Syfy allowed the lights to synchronize with Sharknado 2. Later, he was made to work with 12 monkeys and an Xbox game. But these integrations all required "lighting scripts," which meant that someone had to manually decide how the lighting would change at each moment of a movie. Signify claims to have not given up on lightweight scripts, but recognizes that they are not easy to scale – this is where automated systems such as Hue Play come into play.
Last year, Signify took its first steps in an automated system with the Hue Sync application, which would synchronize the lights with everything that was on a Mac or a Windows PC. It worked well, but was limited to computers.
Hue Play Box finally brings this exact feature to the TVs, but unfortunately it is a more expensive option. When it launches on October 15, it will sell for $ 229.99.
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