The concept your lounge TV needs to be a central place to attach, management, and handle your good house is one which I consider has been a long time coming. And it seems to be like Samsung could be the first to get there.
Samsung has been slowly including good dwelling options to its TVs, turning them into hubs for its SmartThings dwelling automation platform, including Matter controller capabilities so any Matter gadget can hook up with them, and just lately turning its newest TVs into Thread border routers. All of this implies you should use your TV to attach and management good gadgets like lights and locks without having a separate hub. And this week at CES, Samsung revealed the way it’s turning the most important display in your own home right into a bona fide good show.
A brand new dashboard display referred to as Now Plus is coming to its televisions. It will activate as you strategy the TV — so that you don’t must get out the distant — and show playing cards with details about your good dwelling gadgets, resembling your property’s digital camera feeds, indoor temperature, and the way lengthy is left on the laundry. The knowledge playing cards look just like the way in which an Echo Present or Google Nest hub good show exhibits related info on their always-on shows.
There may be additionally a brand new fast panel to allow you to entry features, together with turning on lights and locking doorways. This feels like an enormous enchancment in comparison with simply slapping a model of the SmartThings app on a TV display, which is at present the way you management SmartThings gadgets on a Samsung TV.
Samsung can be bringing a brand new, extra intuitive interface to the TV. Its map view will now be accessible on the TV, and it’s rolling this good dwelling interface out extra broadly throughout its platform. Map view is just like Amazon’s new Map View interface (though Samsung’s version came first). SmartThings’ map view locations your linked devices on an interactive map structure the place you may management gadgets like lights and locks in actual time and monitor safety cameras and power utilization.
The map view must be created within the SmartThings app on a cellphone or pill, however you may then test or management the standing of every room and good gadget in your house in your TV and from the display of your Samsung Family Hub smart fridge, too. It’s additionally obtainable on Samsung’s M8 screens.
Map view can be getting new AI characters that may mimic members of the family and even pets, plus new methods to generate a map of your property.
Amazon’s model of map view requires a lidar-equipped iPhone to scan your property, however Samsung says it’s in a position to create a ground plan utilizing simply your handle (we’re not clear on how this one works), or you may take a photograph of an current ground plan you might have, and SmartThings will convert it to 3D.
Another choice is to make use of a lidar-enabled Samsung gadget — resembling the brand new JetBot robot vacuum or the Ballie AI robotic — and ship the robots to scan the house and generate a ground plan. In line with Samsung, Ballie may even place your good gadgets in the fitting place in your house for you.
What’s Ballie, you ask? Nicely, Ballie is Samsung’s rolling home robot, which launched with a lot fanfare at CES 2020 however has since been nowhere to be seen. It sounds just like the spherical robotic ball could also be again at CES 2024. I, for one, am very excited to see the little yellow man rolling across the ground in Vegas this week.