Wow. Computer-controlled colored lights work really well as an alarm clock. Give the bedroom a pleasant ambience with enough blue photons bouncing around, and I simply wake the fuck up. I’m not fighting the instinct to sleep like when an audio alarm wakes me up; I’m not dealing with a moment of body panic from a loud noise either. I’m just… up. With not the faintest hope of going back to sleep because my entire body has been fooled into thinking that it is time to be awake despite it being kinda grey and crappy outside.
And, interestingly enough, really not much interest in lying in bed and lazily poking at the Internet for a few hours. We’ll see if that persists once I get the lights to the point where I stop fiddling with them.
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My current lighting setup is as follows:
Studio – three LIFX bulbs, blue-green themes during the work day, redder ones in the evening.
Bedroom – two Hue bulbs, slowly pulsing red/magenta at 7, then going to warm/cold white around 8. I’m still working out this sequence.
Foyer – one Hue bulb, changing between blue/purple/green based on temperature.
Since this is a mixed-brand setup, I’m controlling it with Lightbow on iOS, which sucks the least of all the light controllers I’ve tried. The foyer is done with If This Then That, which I really wish I could tell to only run during certain hours so I don’t get up in the middle of the night and have a dose of blue photons when it’s freezing.