An Apple patent has been disclosed that hints at some form of auto-adjusting light system for the inside of buildings and maybe even vehicles.
The patent details a form of keeping a room’s ambient light the same even as the sun moves behind clouds or begins to set.
For example, your baseline is a lamp on a table with a smart light set to 50 percent brightness and sunlight shining through a window. It appears that from this patent, at some point when the sun moves behind a dark cloud making the room darker, a sensor should be able to detect this and raise the lamp’s brightness to counteract the less light that would have come from the sun.
Apple’s patent also talks about a device that can sense the changes in light. It’s unclear if this is a standalone device or not. Still, I think it would be very interesting if this light-sensing technology was built into Apple’s hardware, especially the HomePod.
This feature could even be applied to self-driving cars– because users don’t need to concentrate on the road they can have interior lights on all the time.
Apple also mentions that it could create some form of lighting to go around the edge of a window to help counteract the changing brightness from the sun.
I’m not sure I like this idea since the changing conditions of natural light are what make it feel unique and, well, natural. However, having a system brightening my internal lights as the sun goes down would be handy.
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