You can decorate your computer, behind a TV and screen, and your walls with colourful LEDs. And later this year, you can emulate a skylight, too.
There are lots of ways to make a home into a smart home, but one of the more obvious approaches has to do with light.
While a smart speaker can give you sound, a smart light can change the look and feel of a room by changing the lighting to match a time, a mood, or even some sound being played at the time.
It’s no wonder that smart light bulbs are considered an obvious go-to when someone wants to dabble with the idea of connecting their home to the web, and it’s an area that is expanding with new ideas. Smart lights on Christmas trees is one approach, as is smart lights that work during Halloween, but there are also ways to give your home some clever decor using smart lighting, as well.
That’s an area Nanoleaf has been working in for quite a while, building smart lighting strips and special panels that can change their lighting to match moods and scenes that are programmed or responsive, bringing to life the walls of an interior.
This year, though, the company isn’t so much looking to the walls for something new, but somewhere much higher: your ceiling.
Nanoleaf’s Skylight Modular Ceiling Light Panels are a series of flat panels made to be mounted on a ceiling, delivering a similar approach for wall panels Nanoleaf already delivers, but on the ceiling instead.
The panels can handle bright whites and up to 16 million colours, creating lighting that’s a single colour or themed to match ambience, programming the results using an app or triggering them with schedules, as well.
Like Nanoleaf’s other panels, one must always be hard-wired and powered, but up to 100 more can be linked together to create a ceiling panel design of your own making. That could be as simple as a single square to something much larger or a totally different shape, so long as it’s made from the square panels being released.
There’s a lifespan of up to 25,000 hours, which is the equivalent of a little under three years if they’re powered on the entire time, so most homes should be able to get substantially more. Powered for eight hours of use per day, that should be roughly eight years or so, give or take.
Setting up lots of lights won’t be cheap, mind you, with the Nanoleaf Skylight kit costing $469.99 for a three pack of lights and a single panel expansion kit costing $139.99 each when they’re released in Australia mid-February this year.
