IKEA wants to be your future smart home provider

Currently, filling your home with the Internet of Things has been an expensive process. But IKEA is now looking to develop cheap alternatives, starting with smart lightbulbs – and no, they’re not flatpacked.

One of the ideas is a bedside lamp that would be able to imitate the glow of the sun rising, while elsewhere in your house coffee is concurrently being automatically brewed. While that particular scenario sounds too similar to the Wallace and Gromit method of getting out of bed, the amount of personalisation that IKEA seems to be offering is certainly attractive.

Most of the customisation seems to root from a portable, pocket-sized switch that will adjust the lights automatically as you carry it into another room – a stark difference from some other smarthome products available at the moment that take up a stupid amount of space.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen IKEA enter the field of smarthome technology. Its line of Qi-enabled lamps allows you to change your phone or tablet by just placing them on their base. For a while, IKEA was also promoting Uppleva, a smart TV and sound system – but that has fallen off the radar.

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