You can select for the lamp to observe the pure dawn and sundown instances primarily based in your location, which in a lot of the world modifications somewhat day-to-day. Or you’ll be able to set customized instances within the app. I did not need the lamp’s sundown to start at 7:30 pm day-after-day, so I set my sundown to 9:30 pm. As night time fell every day, the lamp would slowly cut back its blue mild, simply as a standard sundown does. It indicators your physique to begin winding down and readying for sleep.
You can even set how steadily the lights fade out and in, respectively—as much as an hour—and the brightness and temperature of the sunshine. The lamp could be linked to Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant if you would like to combine it into your good dwelling, however it is not required.
I did have some points. Sometimes the sunshine routine acquired caught after I plugged within the lamp or turned it on, and I needed to toggle one of many 4 “schedule override” settings on and off to get the lamp to enter its preprogrammed routine. These overrides allow you to set the sunshine for a particular activity, together with sleeping, studying, stress-free, and dealing.
Using it outdoors your bed room can also be odd. Assuming you do not dwell in a dorm room or a studio condo, you may have to hold the Skyview 2 into your bed room every night time and plug it right into a wall in order that the dawn operate wakes you up within the morning. It will not do you any good if it is going via its dawn routine in another a part of the home the place you are not sleeping. But you then’ll have to select it up and transfer it into one other room—an workplace, the lounge, or wherever you spend a lot of your day—to profit from its all-day light-shifting sample and sundown routine. If you end up irritated or slowed down by small duties like that, it is one thing to remember.
The lamp itself is constructed properly. The vast, metallic base prevents it from tipping over from something lower than an excellent whack, and the sunshine enclosure is so thick you may most likely knock down bowling pins with it. The lens is frosted sufficient that I might look proper at it with out blinding myself. It additionally stayed cool to the contact, regardless of how lengthy it’d been on 100% brightness.
So, Did It Light Up My Life?
Photograph: Biological Innovation and Optimization Systems
I loved the impact all through the day. It’s troublesome to say whether or not I’m experiencing a placebo impact or the sunshine actually helps, however emotionally, it was good to have a bit of sunshine selection all through my day between sunup and sunset.
Cooping your self up indoors all day below the identical taste of unchanging mild from daybreak to nightfall is bizarre and unnatural. For of us in a room with no window, the Skyview 2 could possibly be a godsend.
But at $449, it is a expensive godsend. A Philips Hue A19 White Ambiance Smart Light Bulb prices $26 and you may screw it into any lamp and program it through the intuitive Hue app to imitate dawn routines, sundown routines, and the shifting mild all through the day. And you should buy a couple of of them. For this form of cash, the Skyview 2 ought to do extra. For instance, if it had been shiny sufficient to negate the necessity for different lamps in my front room, then I’d have a barely simpler time justifying the value.
You pay a premium for the Skyview 2. Does it work? Yes. You can create an identical impact with good bulbs. But for a plug-and-go resolution, it positive was a novel approach of pretending that I lived in a shiny and sunny condo, if solely till my time with the Skyview 2 got here to an finish.