Philips Hue lighting scenes are about to get a lot more sophisticated thanks to an upcoming feature called SpatialAware.

Rather than mix scene colors randomly between different lights in a room, the new feature knows where each light is positioned and can use that information to create a much more coherent look …

If you have multiple color bulbs or lights, both the official Hue app and third-party apps can create scenes which mix and match colors between them. For example, a sunset scene could set one bulb to orange, another to pink, another to red, and a fourth one to yellow. However, the distribution of these colors throughout a room is currently random.

As Hueblog reports, the upcoming SpatialAware feature will change this.

First, you need to scan the desired rooms with your smartphone camera and use augmented reality to determine the positions of the individual lights. A smart algorithm then ensures that the light points throughout the room are coordinated […]

When you use SpatialAware in a room, the scenes should appear even more immersive and lifelike. “In a sunset scene, for example, the lights on one side of the room emit warm yellow tones to mimic the setting sun, while the ceiling lights on the opposite side reflect darker shades,” writes Philips Hue in a press release.

You can see an example of this in the images above. In a real sunset, you would have colors low down on the horizon fading into blues in the sky above, and that’s what is mimicked in the new SpatialAware version of the Lake Mist scene.

While this is undoubtedly smarter, it remains to be seen how well it will work in practice. Personally, I prefer the look of the dumber version to the smarter one in the sample images Philips provided …

SpatialAware requires the Hue Bridge Pro and is set to arrive in the spring.

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