Philips Hue lights will sync with PCs through a new app that the company plans to launch later this year, called Hue Sync. Announced during CES 2018 this week, Philips opened up with a little bit of detail about the upcoming application in its growing effort to expand the Hue ecosystem and the compatibility with its smart home lighting solutions. Hue Sync is an app which is expected to launch in the second quarter of this year so while it isn’t quite available yet for owners of Hue lights, Philips promises some pretty interesting features for the app once it does launch.
The main goal of the new app will be to allow users to have a more immersive experience with the content that they’re interacting with on their computers. This is not too unlike the announcement made by Razer and Philips just yesterday that will see the Philips Hue lights integrate with Razer’s Chroma lighting-equipped gear, though it might not be as in-depth. With the Hue Sync app, the colors of whatever is on screen will be scanned by the app and that will be relayed to the lights, so whether you’re watching a movie or playing a game you can still have a more immersive experience even if you don’t have any Razer gear that comes with Chroma lighting as the lights will match the scene of your content. As mentioned though, the Chroma integration will be more advanced as specific profiles for games are going to be created which can change the color of the Hue lights to match the colors of the lights on keyboards and other Razer gear as opposed to just the colors that are on screen.
In addition to movies and games the Hue Sync app will also create “immersive light scripts” for music being played on the computer as well. Philips also states that the app will be compatible with both Windows 10 PCs and Mac PCs running on macOS High Sierra. Just like with the Razer Chroma integration users of the Hue Sync app will need the Hue V2 Bridge, as well as the Hue color smart bulbs to get everything looking nice.