FAQ
What are the hardware requirements to use VCI in the future?
Of course, you would need a pair of AR glasses. The AR glasses and smart home devices should have Ultra Wide Band technology enable for spatial positioning. Cameras are not required for the AR glasses if you have wrist bands that can track your hand movement and recognize hand gestures.
To use VCI-VR, you will need an Oculus Quest.
How is VCI different from using an app on a mobile phone
The interfaces on mobile apps are physically disconnected from the smart home devices. The users have to remember the mapping from a device name to the device in order to use the mobile app. This will become a challenge when the future houses have hundreds of smart home devices. With VCI, the interfaces are directly overlayed onto the smart devices themselves, removing the need to remember such mapping.
How is VCI different from a smart speaker?
Similar to using an app, the user needs to remember the mapping between a name and an actual device. It is even worse in the case of using a smart speaker. If you have 10 blinds in the living room, how will you know which one is the "blind one"? Then you need to remember precisely what are the possible voice commands for each of the smart home devices.
With VCI's Gaze + Voice Command, you just need to look at a smart home device, and VCI will suggest what commands you might want to say. You don't have to remember anything.
What if I don't want to see VCI all the time?
VCI (except notifications and proximity controls) will only show if you have your control center opened. The Control center is similar to what you have for smartphones today; you can quickly change some settings of the AR glasses. It depends on how the AR glasses manufacturers implement gestures to open the control center. For VCI-VR, swipe your hand from left to right to open, and right to left to close the control center and VCI.
What if I want a guest or a technician to access parts of the VCI?
Based on our assumption of AR Glasses providing identity recognition, in the future, we plan to integrate access management for each smart home devices. Based on your role you can have full/partial/special/no access, just like any security system much like a computer system. The benefit of VCI is the interfaces can be highly personalized for different users with different access levels.
What if a lot of smart home devices are in the same direction, will the dots overlap?
The short answer is: Yes, for now.
We are planning to introduce group indicator points that will group indicator points together if they are close together and a machine learning model to hide unimportant indicator points based on the user's preference and other factors.