The new “first-of-its-kind” SKYVIEW lamp made its official debut last week, and we are now ready to weigh in after putting it to the test. The not quite smart lamp actually has a number of intelligent features in tow, most of which surrounding research done in the way outdoor light conditions can effect our mood and productivity levels, but it also syncs up with the sunset/sunrise conditions in your neck of the woods to provide “light as it was meant be experienced” directly on your nightstand, workspace, or living room end table as well. Head below for our hands-on review of the now available new SKYVIEW lamp.
What is SKYVIEW?
SKYVIEW is an intelligent lamp designed to help balance your circadian rhythm, increase productivity, and enhance your mood by leveraging what the brand claims as scientifically backed research.
Outdoor light transmits information directly to our internal clocks via a special photopigment in the eye known as melanopsin. And the former NASA scientists at SKYVIEW are looking to leverage this understanding to bring this sort of experience into our homes the way traditional lights do not, according to BIOS SKYVIEW syncs up with lighting conditions (sunset/sunrise time) in your location to automatically change tones and colors based on the time of day in order to make this all happen.
But on a more basic level, it’s just a really cool-looking lamp that automatically moves through cool sky blue gradient tones throughout the day, into calming yellows in the evening and moves through deep blues and soft pinks at twilight to start your day.
Build quality and design
The overall design here is a pleasing one. Simple, clean, modern, and yet somehow reaching back to those bulb-style bauhaus vibes. Measuring out at 11.6 inches high by 8 inches in width, it is essentially a white diffuse polycarbonate globe sitting atop a solid black billet aluminum base with a silver-gray knob to turn the light on and off, engage Bluetooth pairing, and manually adjust the brightness on demand. It is a nice clean look to my eyes, although it’s easy to imagine some folks wanting to have their choice of base color to match up with aesthetic preferences and to match room decor – perhaps an Apple silver or white, or even a wood base option might have helped the cause here.
Inside of the globe fixture, you’ll find a UV-free 22-watt integrated LED bulb rated to last for 50,000 hours. It cannot be replaced by the user, but that’s more than roughly 2,083 days of constant usage before it will be rendered useless.
App customization
There is a host of customization options here as well. You can set your own schedules so it doesn’t wake you up at the wrong time or light up with the sunrise on the weekend when you would have wanted to sleep in well past that. These options also move over to the color temperatures and brightness – you can adjust the tone/hue and brightness for the daytime, evening, and night. You’ll see a sky blue to white in the day, dark orange to pale yellow in the evening, and a slightly darker orange to yellow at night with particularly nice light hues of purple and pink at sunrise.
Overall, the scheduling customization and user-set brightness options are both a welcomed and, frankly, necessary touch here. I would like to see some enhancements on the app side of things down the line – it seems entirely possible to give folks who don’t care as much about the wellness aspects here more tone and hue options, for example – without needing to buy a new SKYVIEW. But all-in-all it is a solid system that does what it says it does and you might not want to spend the cash it requires to get one if you didn’t at least partially believe in the system anyway.
App Schedule Override
From within the app you get access to what the system refers to as Schedule Override. It is essentially four preset settings for the SKYVIEW lamp you can engage with the push of a button: Sleeping, Reading, Relaxing, and Working or a darker red, bright warm white-yellow, dim moody yellow, and super bright sky blue to white gradient. As far as I can tell, and I’ve tried everything, there’s no way to customize these preset settings. It would have been nice to set my own sleeping, reading, relaxing, and working colors and tones.
Cloud simulation on the way
For some reason – and I know this completely defeats the purpose of the whole circadian rhythm thing going on here – I might have preferred it literally match the conditions outside syncing up with hyperlocal weather as opposed to just twilight, sunrise, sunset,evening, and everything in between. How cool would it be if it automatically moved into a moody gray when it was overcast outside and brightens up sky blue on clear sunny days or matched the snow fall in the winter somehow? While that’s clearly not the point here, I can’t help but feel like I, for one, might have appreciated that tech just a little more.
While the SKYVIEW model on display here does not support cloud sim, it should be said that the SKYVIEW Pro launching later this year (at an even steeper price tag) will. This will, presumably, dim the light in some way as cloud coverage makes its way across the sky in your location and will, at least in part, deliver my dream of a more weather-based indoor lighting setup.
SKYVIEW review – Wrap-up
The ability for a lamp, scientifically proven or otherwise, to improve your mood, make you more productive, and have a better night’s rest sounds like a great thing to me but is going to be hit or miss I would presume. Some folks just don’t care about any of that or just don’t believe in it no matter what the studies show. Understandable for sure. I fall somewhere in between – I don’t particularly care about any of that, but can’t help but believe in the work folks far smarter than I do in the field.
On a more practical real-world note, I do enjoy waking up to the SKYVIEW; it has been a pleasure to have its pale yellow transition in to a moody purple-ish blue, then a blue-ish pink, and finally into a wonderfully pleasant sky blue glow later in the morning and throughout the work day. And it really has been nice to get a glass of wine and some daily reading in as it slowly moves into the evening and night time settings. Most of the action, at least in terms of automatically moving through the color gradients, happens in the transition from day to night and even more so from the night into the morning – you’ll want to ensure the brightness settings for each phase are close to ensure smooth color and tone transitions throughout in my experience.
There are certainly more affordable sunrise lamps out there that both claim to carry the same health and mood benefits with some degree of automatic temperature and color changing action – some even have touch and gesture support for adjusting settings you won’t get with SKYVIEW. But there’s just something about the size, presence, and vibes the SKYVIEW gives off that makes me feel as though it’s on another level.
Another important comparative aspect here is the design – it actually looks really cool and something I don’t mind having in my home. Many of the popular sunrise lamps out there are, to put it bluntly, extremely ugly. There are a few exceptions, but by in large they are horrible monstrosities that look like they belong in a hospital or research center at best to me. The SKYVIEW, on the other hand, is gorgeous.
Are there some missed opportunities in the tech department in my opinion? Yes. Is it just going to be way too expensive for some folks at $450 (including me)? Most definitely. But is it easily one of the most beautiful lamps in its category and a fun way to bring the best of the outdoor mood-enhancing experience inside? Also very much yes.
The SKYVIEW isn’t trying to be an all-in-one bedside and workstation smart lamp. It doesn’t have all the extra bells and whistles – sleep tracking, gesture support, a built-in sleep machine, alarm settings, and more – some have started to expect from other brands in the smart home space, nor does it want to. To me it falls more into the higher-end home decor category with some interesting wellness and automated geo-syncing tech, and does it well.
Buy the SKYVIEW lamp
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