Philips Hue SpatialAware treats smart lights like Dolby Atmos treats speakers
The Hue Scene Gallery will distribute light differently depending on where your smart bulbs are placed in the room. Meet Hue SpatialAware
Signify, the company behind the Philips Hue lighting brand, has developed a new SpatialAware technology that’ll sense the position of smart lights in the room to customise the light distribution from the company’s Hue Scenes gallery.
The new SpatialAware technology announced at CES 2026 is very much akin to what we’ve seen from audio providers like Sonos and Dolby where the positioning of the speakers within the room will determine the audio output. Just week we’ve seen the launch of Dolby Atmos FlexConnect on LG speakers, which operates on a similar principle.
The new SpatialAware tech, which requires the most recent Hue Bridge Pro from 2025 but doesn’t require any special bulbs, works via a smartphone camera to scan the entirety of the room in order to recognise the position of each bulb or light. Thereafter, it’s easy to add more lights to a scanned room and the algorithm will automatically reconfigure the scenes.
That’ll allow the Hue system to be more deliberate about setting scenes. Signify says this is a significant step forward in smart lighting design that would otherwise require a bespoke lighting designer.
The company explains: “Currently, when using preset scenes from the Scene Gallery in the Philips Hue app, colours are distributed without knowledge of their relative positions across the products in a room.
“With Hue SpatialAware scenes, it’s like having your Philips Hue setup instantly curated by a professional lighting designer: colours are distributed intelligently across all the lights in the room to create the most natural representation.”
Signify says around half of the Scenes in the Gallery have already been remastered to accommodate the SpatialAware tech, explaining it has been designed to work most effectively with nature-inspired scenes like Lake Mist, Mountain Breeze, Savanna Sunset, and Lake Placid.
We’re excited to see how this works in practice and, on the surface, it might prompt me to buy a new Hue Bridge Pro. I’ve often thought the way the lights are assigned colours within the scenes felt a bit random, so this appears certain to clear-up that complaint.
Elsewhere, Signify has announced the Hue Secure camera, Hue Secure video doorbell, and Hue contact sensors will soon work with Apple Home. That’s likely part of the Matter 1.5 rollout that supports smart cameras.
Chris Smith
