A skylight used to be a roofing job. It is becoming an electrician's.
At the September IFA electronics show in Berlin, Govee introduced a ceiling fixture designed to sit up inside the ceiling rather than below it, so the light appears to fall from farther away, the way daylight does down a shaft. According to Govee, it delivers up to 7,000 lumens across a range from deep amber to bluish noon white, and includes a sky-blue wavelength meant to keep people alert in rooms the sun never reaches. It lists at about $400. A windowless basement or an interior office can be made to feel like it has weather overhead.
Fixtures in this class shift brightness and color on their own through the day — cool and bright during working hours, warmer and lower toward evening — with nobody reaching for a switch. Most of them answer to Apple Home, Google Home and Alexa through the Matter standard.
A game room is the other obvious fit. The same fixtures can be set to hold the colors of whatever is on the screen, or to follow the music, which is a cheaper way to change a room than paint.
What they cannot quite do is show a picture. Govee's other new ceiling model packs 616 separately controlled lights into a 21-inch circle, which is enough for shapes and motion and not much more. Photographs loaded into it come out as smears of color. Reviewing the fixture for Gizmodo, Wes Davis compared the effect to looking at an image through someone else's prescription glasses.
Spread across a 21-inch fixture, each of those 616 points of light is about the size of a postage stamp.
Rick Good spent ten years in the newspaper business, including with The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The Greenville News (Greenville, SC). He co-wrote, with Melinda Coleman, Rutledge to Riley: Governors of South Carolina, 1776–Present (Published by The Greenville News), and is the author of Mind Games Trivia #1 (Amazon). He has recently spent 15 years creating original trivia content through Sounds Good Mobile Entertainment and continues that with his new company, SGME Software. He edits The Smart Reader’s money, real estate, and business coverage.