Any gamer worth their salt will be aware of Nanoleaf and its range of lights you see in just about any streaming setup ever if you turn on YouTube or Twitch.
If you are looking to create the best ambiance for your games room, even if you aren’t planning on streaming, sure you could head off to Amazon and buy any of the plenty of knock-off rubbish copies that line the store, or you could save up if you need to and spend the extra on probably the only set of games room lights you will ever need.
Let’s look at some of the best options that we can currently get from Nanoleaf.
Best Nanoleaf lights in 2024
Nanoleaf Skylight
We will deal with this one first for two reasons. Firstly it is one of Nanoleaf’s latest products having first been shown off at CES 2023 before making another appearance at CES 2024 in January and secondly because it is the one that takes the most effort and expense.
Skylight is a replacement for your actual regular ceiling light that came with your bricks and mortar, not just something you stick to your wall and make pretty shapes with. This hangs above you and makes pretty shapes and is very cool – however, you may well need to employ the skills of an electrician as it needs wiring to mains electricity, as well as attaching securely to your joists. As you can see, Skylight looks amazing, however, the Starter Kit only includes three panels with extra panels to make the kinds of ceiling-wide effects you see here coming in at around $80 a pop. The three you get initially, if you are not careful can make it look a bit like the lights you get in an office when they aren’t turned on. They aren’t aesthetic during the daytime so you will have to bear that in mind.
In action though, if you can afford a lot of them Skylight is a real talking point.
Nanoleaf Lines
Now you will be familiar with Lines as they are on a million channels and streams and they are one of our favorites. The starter pack comes with nine lines and they are considerably bigger than you may need. I have Nanoleaf lines and only use eight out of the pack in the space we have available and they look very cool.
Of course, the more Lines you have the bigger your lighting design can be – you can purchase extra sets of three at a time and they come in a variety of options – lines that connect at 60 degrees and lines that connect at 90 degrees. The Lines are actually pieces of plastic with the LEDs behind them so they actually cast a cool backlight and can be changed to any color and hundreds of lighting patterns.
The plastic is white which may not fit in with your decor but you can buy black “skins” for them from Nanoleaf relatively cheaper to help tone them down a little.
Nanoleaf 4D
Another one of Nanoleaf’s products that is great for gaming in the 4D TV lighting set. You will probably have seen streamers with ambient light emitting from behind their screens as they play, and, while this is easy to do cheaply with the first strip of LED lights you find on Amazon, what that cannot do is automatically tie in the lighting to what is appearing on screen.
This requires some clever magic that the 4D kit provides for you and utilizes a camera hanging over the top of your screen which takes a little getting used to (you can also place it at the bottom if you have a suitable set-up.
Then in Nanoleaf’s app you can switch on Mirroring and the camera will send information to the strip and alter the colors depending on the colors on the screen. Sports for example will largely see a green hue projected around the TV whereas an excessive amount of red in a corner will turn the corner of the wall behind it red.
It’s really quite subtle but it’s amazing how immersive it is. It does take a degree of patience with the calibration set-up to get everything as good as it can be but there are plenty of YouTube videos to walk you through it.
Nanoleaf Shapes
The final kits we are going to look at here are the much-loved Shapes, and these are the ones you are most likely to see sad likenesses of Amazon. I have bought cheap ones myself and each panel turned out to be about 25% of the size of a Nanoleaf Shape. Shapes come in Hexagons and Triangles and you can even mix them together to go geometric crazy. Again they can play out lit animations or stay as static colors. They look great in any gaming setup and can be set to sync with the 4D kit if you have that on your monitor as well.
What to think about
The main thing you need to remember, and never really notice when you look at all the pretty pictures is that all Nanoleaf products need power, and, with the exception of the Skylight, none of that is hidden. Short of drilling holes, you are going to have a cable running down to a nearby socket. You can mitigate it a little by maybe painting it the same color as your wall, and you won’t really see it when the lights are down, but in the daytime, the white cables do stand out. Just something to bear in mind.
Installation is generally as easy as using the sticker-backed connectors which work like Command Strips and shouldn’t damage your painting. The exception is the Skylight which is slightly more of a DIY project.
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