Do Smart Homes Need A Brain?

Lighthouse designs a home security camera that features 3D-sensing technology and artificial intelligence.

17:52 15 May 2017

Lighthouse, a startup out of Android cofounder Andy Rubin’s Playground incubator, thinks that your smart home isn’t really smart – it’s just remote controlled.

 

The company’s CEO, Alex Teichman, said: “It’s great that you can turn down the heat when you’re away at work. But all the intelligence is coming from you. It’s not actually smart yet.”

 

The company, which aims to finally give smart home the much-needed brain, redesigned the home security camera to include 3D-sensing technology as self-driving cars as well as artificial intelligence so it can make sense of what is happening around it on its own.

 

The company’s first product, Lighthouse interactive, is the brainchild of Teichman, who got his PhD working at famed Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s self-driving car lab and his co-founder Hendrik Dahlkamp, the first Google X engineer and a DARPA Grand Challenge winner. Not only does it detect who’s at home but also what everybody is doing. It can also process and act on complex commands such as “let me know if the kids don’t get home between 3pm and 5pm.”

 

Teichman says that Interactive is the brain that the home has been missing – an assistant that can proactively inform you ahead of time when something goes wrong as well as empower you to check in on your home remotely.