It turns out I’ve been using my Hue lights all wrong

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 you light your space, but the lights don’t know where they are physically in your home, and the effect can get diluted. Philips Hue has a solution to this problem: SpatialAware.

SpatialAware knows your room’s layout and the placement of your Hue lights, so it can determine the best way to distribute the scene’s colors and effects across them.

It gets the data when you scan your space with your smartphone in the Hue app. Using your phone’s AR capabilities, the system can create a 3D model of the placement of Hue lights in your room.

That’s then stored as a map in the Hue app, and when you apply one of Hue’s newly remastered scenes, it will distribute the light intelligently based on where bulbs and fixtures are.

So, for a sunset scene, for example, the lamps on one side of the room will show warm yellow tones to mimic the setting sun, while the 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 to adapt to the new data on the lights’ placement.

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.

Held in a dining room filled with Hue ambient lighting products and Hue bulbs in overhead can lighting, the demo showed the original scene, then the remastered scene.

As you can see in the video above, the lighting is distributed in a more polished 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 remastered Savannah sunset scene are a soft orange glow, whereas in the original, a couple are orange and a couple soft white, which creates an awkward look.

In the Nightlight scene, the original version has the ceiling lights on, but the remastered one turns them all off, “because you don’t want ceiling lights on in a night light 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