Philips' huge Hue refresh brings motion detection to its smart lights

Philips has just announced a monster list of new products for its Hue lineup, part of an overhaul announced at the IFA conference in Berlin.

In recent years, the Philips Hue line has struggled, as cheaper smart lights (that don't require a complicated hub) entered the market.

The new products include smart light bulbs, the new Hue Bridge Pro, and not one, but seven new light strip products. Tucked in the announcement was a neat new feature called MotionAware, which will activate your lights when they sense motion. 

A press release states:

Built with a processor five times more powerful and a memory 15 times larger than the Philips Hue Bridge, the Hue Bridge Pro allows users to store over 500 custom lighting scenes and enjoy faster response times across the system. It’s powered by the new Hue Chip Pro and enables cutting-edge capabilities like Hue Motion Aware – an advanced smart feature that transforms Philips Hue lights into motion sensors which turn on the lights when motion is detected.

This new feature can be useful in a variety of ways, and the way it works is pretty neat, too. It works when using Zigbee by measuring fluctuations in the wireless signal strength that occur when a person walks through them. Once it measures this fluctuation, the lights will turn on all on their own without any voice or app commands. 

The obvious use case for this feature would be having your lights turn on automatically when you get home from work or get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water. However, this can also be part of a home security system. Someone uninvited coming into your home won’t have the cover of darkness as an advantage anymore, as any room set up for MotionAware will light up like New Year’s Eve as they pass through it. 

Per Philips, MotionSense can be set up in any room that has enough lights to accurately measure the aforementioned fluctuations and can be customized so that they only work during certain times of the day. Philips also notes that this is for indoor use only and can’t be used with lights in different rooms. 

So, while it is a very cool feature, you’ll have to invest in a sizable number of Hue lights to make it work. In addition, you’ll need Philips’ new third-generation Hue Bridge Pro, a nearly $100 upgrade that will enable the feature on compatible lights automatically. The updated bridge also adds more features to Philips’ Zigbee bulbs, like lighting scenes and out-of-house controls. 

The good news is that Philips says that the “vast majority of Hue products support Huge MotionAware technology.” Philips has a helpful list that shows the products that do not support MotionAware, so if your lights aren’t on the list, they’ll work for it. A cursory glance over the list shows that very nearly all Philips Hue bulbs and light strips are compatible, including the newest ones. 

According to a press release, most of the new Philips Hue products will be available in North America starting in September, with some products to follow in November.