These cheap smart home lights have a cool Philips Hue beating feature

The market for the best smart home lighting has been fairly static for a while now: we're essentially seeing endless variations on the same basic themes, with various manufacturers offering similar bulbs in slightly new shapes.

So it's nice to see something genuinely innovative happening in the smart home lights space, and for once it doesn't require a massive financial investment, either.

Wiz, the more affordable sibling brand to Philips Hue, has just updated its smart lighting app – and it's also added a new feature called SmartSense that's very clever indeed.

How Wiz can see you from your Wi-Fi

As officially confirmed, SpaceSense uses Wi-Fi sensing tech to detect motion without the need for dedicated motion sensors. Instead, it detects the little ripples people and pets make as they move around the room, slightly occluding the radio signals, and it can then measure the deviation to work out if a large human-sized object is in motion.

Another big advantage of this tech over standard IR motion sensors is that it doesn't require a line of sight; it's omnidirectional and simply requires you to have at least two lights in the room. It needs multiple lights so it knows where the signals are usually coming from and going to, but you don't need to replace your existing bulbs: the new feature is backwards compatible and should work on any Wiz or Wiz-compatible products bought since late 2021.

It's good to see privacy being up-front here too. SpaceSense is opt-in and everything happens locally: there's no face detection being done by faraway servers or data being transmitted to anyone else.

The new version of the Wiz app with SpaceSense will be available at the end of September 2022.

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