(Your) HOME is smarter than you
All of us, at least once in our lives, have felt the strong desire that the light could switch off by itself while we were lazily chilling out on our sofas. To be honest I believe it often happens to you as well as to me. Our inner child wakes up and starts trying to control that light with the power of the brain…no such luck. Our brain cannot control objects (yet), but our iPhone can.
Some days ago I decided to update my iPhone software to iOS 10, it was 2 AM when the whole process finished, I was tired and regretting having done it so late at night. While I was still complaining, something exciting caught my attention: HOME, that’s the name of the new app launched by Apple along with the new software.
Do you know what it means? It’s very easy: you can avoid standing up from the sofa, controlling your house from your smartphone, smartwatch or iPad. Thank you Apple!
After Amazon Echo and Google Home “Appleaholics” were impatient to see the latest but absolutely not the least competitive product in the category of home remote controlling systems.
There is no need to talk about the design: captivating and essential, simply Apple. So let’s go straight to the product’s features which can be categorized under three phases:
CONNECT
It’s the very first interaction between you and Home. The app works with special compatible accessories. The number of these accessories has grown for obvious reasons since the launch of the app. They are available for purchase on Apple’s website and produced by more than 50 partner companies, all you need to do is buy these components, called Home kit, and connect them via Bluetooth with your Apple device. We think that the connecting process is the crucial one as well as being the slowest as not everyone will be in a rush to buy a set of these new devices, it’s more a long-term process, but sometimes what we think is far off in the future becomes present reality faster than we predict.
CONTROL
Home’s main function is controlling our house security, consumption and status, making accessories such as lights, locks, doorbells, cameras, thermostats, sensors and others smart objects.
The app is visually clean and well structured, it allows you to virtually reproduce your house’s space creating:
-Rooms
Each room in your house is displayed in the app as a folder with a name you can choose, so you can connect each accessory to the correct room and easily switch on just one of them or set up the whole room with the touch of a button or asking Siri to do it for you. Of course you can add rooms, remove them and play with the design selecting real pictures as the cover photo for each folder.
-Scenarios
A scenario is a condition you can set which enables several accessories to work in combination, just with one command. For example you can create the scenario “I am setting off” and associate it with the lights turning of, the curtains drawing and the door locking. It’s a further facilitating tool for making the whole experience enjoyable, as easy and quick as possible. Fun, isn’t it? So…
ENJOY
Yes, it’s a matter of enjoying and making our life easier, technology will work for us more and more while we will be concentrating on our family, work or on the last book we bought. We at ürbes believe that home remote controlling is an interesting branch of smart cities innovation’s concept, not only because of our houses becoming smarter, connected, and automated but also because the same kind of innovation could be implemented in public places, public buildings such as government ministries, libraries, museums as well as in our trains and buses. In this scenario avoiding energy wasting and consumption could be less demanding.
It’s unquestionable that such a breakthrough requires economic effort to be applied on a major scale. Using remote controlling system in the places we mentioned above, which are technologically and complexity far from our private spaces, would be ambitious. Nevertheless it is also true that money and effort will be saved afterwards.
…We are delighted to have the possibility to switch off the lights while lying on our sofas,
And you? If you are not, stay tuned and be ready to change your mind!
