Smart home technology has come a long way in recent years. Even if you’re not creating an extensive custom-built system that uses Home Assistant to allow a range of different platforms to interface together, there’s a good chance you have some smart home technology in your house or apartment thanks to products like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Smart Speakers.
With today’s kit, you can easily make some nifty automation in your home to help make life easier, more convenient, and more comfortable, such as automating your heating, making your lights come on when you enter a room, or getting alerts to your phone if someone’s at your door.
But have you ever considered how you can make your gaming experience better using smart home technology? Here are some top ideas.
Set the Scene With the Right Lights
Gaming and RGB lights seem to go hand-in-hand and the range of lighting options has exploded in recent years to include everything from simple LED strips to entire panels for your walls.
These lights, from brands like Govee, can be connected to third-party services like Amazon Alexa or controlled locally through Home Assistant. Through this, you can create the perfect gaming scenes to make the types of games you’re playing.
For example, if you’re a fan of the popular online slot game series Book of Dead, you’ll love its Ancient Egyptian theme. The game’s plot is that Rich Wilde, a legendary explorer, has gone to the North African country to search its famous pyramids for artifacts. This results in a set of reels adorned with gold and other bright colors.
A pre-set Egyptian scene in your Govee app would let you change your room into a glowing gold temple filled with treasure, and a simple voice command to Alexa or another smart speaker could easily activate it.
Playing a game like Among Us, which is set in space, would require a very different color scheme to fit the theme. A cold white or faint blue color with a low brightness setting, perhaps with a glowing effect to simulate the flickering of stars, would help to set the scene.
Shut Out the World
“Alexa, it’s time to play,” you exclaim to your Echo smart speaker. “Ok,” she replies in confirmation. A moment later, your curtains begin to close, your Ring doorbell chime has been silenced, and the main light in your living room has dimmed.
Creating a scene like this is easy to do when you use a platform like Samsung Smartthings or Home Assistant. You can easily connect smart curtain controllers from the likes of Switchbot, a Zigbee light from IKEA, and your Ring doorbell and chime to help cut out distractions when it’s time to unwind with a video game.
If you want to take this automation to the next level, then a contact sensor or vibration sensor could be used to activate the series of actions. For example, a small magnet attached to the back of your controller with the contact sensor on its charging dock would detect that you’d picked up the controller. This could then also cut the power to the charging dock and simultaneously switch on the smart socket that powers your console and TV. A separate IR repeater from Broadlink or Switchbot would even be able to turn on the TV for you.
Set a Reminder of How Long You’ve Been Playing
Video games can be incredibly immersive, allowing you to get lost in a fantasy world where you sit right at the center of the action. While this makes playing video games a great way to blow off steam, it can mean you can spend longer playing than you originally planned.
That’s where your smart home can help. Using some of the same triggers as your automation to activate your house’s ‘game mode’, either a voice command or detecting that you’ve picked up a controller, you can activate a gaming timer.
You can set this timer to be any length of time you like, but once the time expires, you could activate fresh automation, such as flashing the lights or even having your Alexa talk to you.
If you feel like you need a bit of a bigger nudge to put the controller down, you could set a second countdown going once the main timer has triggered. This would give you five or ten minutes to save your game, after which the power could be shut off to the console.