Philips Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip: Elevate Your Monitor Setup

Daniel

Whether you’re a casual gamer, core gamer, or not a gamer at all, the Philips Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip for Monitor can be a pretty appealing addition to your desk.

Philips Hue promotes its Play Gradient light strip for the PC, which may be a bit irritating for Mac users. There is absolutely nothing to stop you from using the LED strip with your macOS system. Especially with the prospect that Apple also wants to put a greater focus on gamers, among others, with the upcoming macOS Sonoma operating system update.

The Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip is available for monitors measuring 24-27 inches, 32-34 inches and for triple monitor systems 3x 24-27 inches. If you don’t have a Hue Bridge in your home yet, a starter kit might be interesting for you.

First, attach the light strip to your monitor in the appropriate size. In our case, this was done within a few minutes with an iMac 24″ M1.

The Hue Bridge is required, as well as the Hue app for your smartphone and the Hue Sync app for the PC or Mac. Via the Hue app, the Lightstrip is quickly added, as you are used to from other Hue lights. There you can also directly set up the entertainment area for your monitor setup.

You only have to start the synchronization via the Hue Sync app on your Mac and the light and color gradient of your Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip will dynamically adapt to the content of your monitor. This is, of course, regardless of whether you’re using the sync for gameplay or perhaps watching video on screen with matching, impressive light sync. It should be noted that synchronization with video streaming sites does not necessarily work, as these services technically protect their content.

Last but not least, the Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip will also show up for you in HomeKit. There, the light strip can be controlled as usual via Siri, as well as integrated into scenes and automations. Thus, we also use the strip as a pleasant background and ambient lighting.

The Apple Adaptive Lighting function is also supported. With this function, the color temperature adjusts automatically throughout the day. So you get warm yellows at sunrise in the morning, cool whites at noon, and softer yellows at sunset in the evening – all automatically. Assuming you’re not using the beta of the Matter integration. Adaptive Lighting is not applicable here.