Huawei Whole-house Intelligence
It may take time for the HarmonyOS phone to come out, while the Smart TV with HarmonyOS OS 2.0 system has arrived. On December 21, 2020, at Huawei’s new product launch, the new Huawei S series Smart TV was introduced, and with it came Huawei’s latest deployment and thinking in the smart home field this year.
At Huawei’s launch event, two new products (or new solutions) were unveiled along with Huawei’s S-Series Smart Screen, Whole-house Intelligence, and Hi-Car Smart Screen. What is Huawei’s interpretation of the smart home, the most intensive position in the field of consumer IoT?
Huawei’s four “Reconfigurations” of the smart home
“Whole-home intelligence is a new solution that we offer around a full-scene solution,” explained Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business. Currently, Huawei’s all-scene solutions include five major sections: smart office, smart travel, audio and video entertainment, sports and health, and smart home, which is also a major strategic deployment of Huawei’s consumer business.
Yu Chengdong believes that although the smart home industry has been developed for a long time, it has been immature. This is also the reason why Huawei has done HiLink, HarmonyOS after further smart home solutions.
At present, there are single product intelligence and single system intelligence in the smart home industry, but there are many barriers to move towards whole house smart intelligence. Among them, high cost and unreliable use are the two major problems that still exist in the smart home field.
Huawei’s solution is to provide intelligent host solutions through the integration of narrow bandwidth “PLC-IoT home bus” and higher bandwidth “home ultra-broadband back-end network”, and to provide a whole set of whole-house intelligent solutions through Huawei Smart Life APP, officially called “Huawei whole-house intelligent ALL IN ONE solution”.
Also through this solution, Yu Chengdong proposed that Huawei should reconfigure the existing whole-house intelligence into four categories.
First, the reconfiguration of the network, the home now exists in the security, audio, control, electricity four networks into a single network – the HiSilicon PLC-IoT home network bus, through modulation and demodulation on the power line, so that all electrical equipment plugged in the case without the distribution network to achieve networking.
Through the HiSilicon PLC-IoT home network bus, Huawei will integrate high-end residential home rooms into ordinary home weak boxes, forming the current Huawei whole-house intelligent host, according to Yu Chengdong, such a program has been applied in the pilot project of Huawei’s smart community in cooperation with China Shipping Real Estate.
Yu also pointed out that the current smart home industry due to the original wired program wiring complex, high cost, there are also such as Zigbee wireless program, but the wireless program is very unreliable, transmission speed, transmission distance, anti-interference are much worse.
Secondly, reconstructing the experience and realizing a new wisdom experience through the host wisdom architecture built by artificial intelligence technology. Huawei’s laboratory to do smart home – the Ark Laboratory for a comprehensive upgrade to 2.0, to provide more intelligent solutions and practical experience.
Third, reconfigure the ecology, now HiLink ecology has 150 + categories, 4000 + SKU, 800 + partners, 220 million + IoT connected devices. According to Yu Chengdong, Huawei does not do home appliances but is an infrastructure provider. Because of this, it can better launch all kinds of modules and ecological solutions jointly with industrial partners, and together promote the PLC-IoT home bus standard.
Fourth, the reconfiguration of the channel, Huawei will join real estate companies, home improvement channels to provide whole-house intelligent solutions. Huawei is now working extensively with home appliance manufacturers, and at the same time, it is also reconfiguring the channel. Through cooperation with real estate manufacturers, directly bring whole-house intelligent solutions; through cooperation with home improvement channels to achieve whole-house intelligence in the secondary decoration process.
Obviously, after years of laying out full-scene hardware products, Huawei is also going down to do whole-house intelligent solutions, especially in strengthening cooperation with real estate manufacturers, catching the front-end market home intelligence of this express train.
Yu Chengdong said, “Huawei whole-house intelligence solutions will be officially commercialized in March next year, and our goal is to bring whole-house intelligence into every smart home.”
At this conference, Huawei invited China Shipping Real Estate, China Resources Land, Jinmao Group, Shen Ye Group, Vanke, Long Lake, Greenland, and Jia Zhaoye real estate manufacturers to stand, officially opening the cooperation ceremony between Huawei and real estate manufacturers in the field of the smart home.
Earlier, Huawei HarmonyOS OS 2.0 cell phone Beta version was released, and the HarmonyOS cell phone will be released in 2021 is written into the development plan of the HarmonyOS system. All along, HarmonyOS’s development history has been of great concern to the industry, especially as a matter of Huawei’s overall layout of the consumer field of the Internet of Things operating system, bearing a lot of Huawei’s efforts.
Wang Chenglu, president of Huawei’s consumer business software department, has previously said that HarmonyOS is designed for IoT, and the development space of the IoT market based on HarmonyOS is enough to feed more than 10 large companies of Huawei’s volume. Thus, the Huawei wisdom screen is an important product of the Huawei layout IoT market.
Huawei Hi-Car Smart screen: can play video calls, can shoot VLOG
Huawei launched another new product at this conference is, Huawei Smart Car Screen.
Before releasing the in-car smart screen, Yu Chengdong revealed that Huawei HiCar has cooperated with 20+ car manufacturers, 150+ cars, providing 30+ applications, realizing the adaptive car screen through distributed UX technology, and will be pre-installed on 5 million new cars in 2021.
Huawei HiCar is a product benchmarked against Apple CarPlay, which requires direct cooperation with car manufacturers and pre-installation into the car.
This time, for the car inventory market, Huawei released this 8.9-inch Huawei Smart Car Screen. For this product, Huawei also equipped with a 360° adjustable base design, according to Yu Chengdong, this base uses a professional SLR camera gimbal ball head structure design to achieve, can be installed in all cars applications.
Through Bluetooth or audio cable support to connect the original car audio, cross-screen applications can achieve a seamless flow of cell phone applications to the car’s smart screen applications.
Through the “audio-video separation” technology, it is possible to transfer image data by Wi-Fi and audio data by Bluetooth. If the phone and car stereo have been connected via Bluetooth, there is no need to change the original car stereo connection when using the car smart screen, and you can also continue to use the original car stereo and realize the voice interaction experience through the voice assistant.
Also due to the use of HarmonyOS operating system, support distributed technology, you can realize the cell phone map in the application to the car screen seamlessly, other content can also be seamlessly connected to this car smart screen. According to Huawei officials, Huawei Smart Car Screen supports three major mainstream navigation applications, Gaode, Baidu, and Sogou Maps, which users can freely choose.
It is noteworthy that Huawei also uses the design of an elevated camera to the car wisdom screen to realize video calls in the car space. Also, the distributed AI capabilities of this camera can achieve such things as fatigue monitoring, gesture control; by carrying a 2K ultra-wide-angle rear camera, you can also realize the rear camera to achieve the function of a car recorder or travel photos. It must be said that Huawei’s first car wisdom screen is indeed much more powerful and convenient than the existing car mount on the market.
High-performance automotive-grade Huawei LiDAR debuts for million-level mass production needs
At Automotive Industry Association sponsored the T10 ICV CTO Summit held in Shanghai, Huawei fusion perception products general manager Duan Zhongyi attended and delivered a speech. At the same time, Huawei for the first time in the industry formally released automotive-grade high-performance LiDAR products and solutions.
It is worth mentioning that ARCFOX has just announced that the Extreme Fox HBT will be equipped with 3 Huawei 96-line medium and long-range LiDARs, as well as 6-millimeter wave radars, 12 cameras, 13 ultrasonic radars, and a Huawei chip with 352Tops of computing power.
According to the official introduction of Huawei’s smart car solution, compared to millimeter-wave radar and cameras, LIDAR has certain advantages in target contour measurement, angle measurement, light stability, and universal obstacle detection. In some difficult scenarios, such as non-regulated pedestrians in urban areas, non-regulated roads, and even non-regulated driving behavior, LIDAR is urgently needed to solve.
Huawei LIDAR products began pre-research in 2016 and were successfully mass-produced in 2020. Huawei’s LIDAR products are positioned for front-end mass production and productized development for front-end mass production of passenger cars. Huawei has developed an intelligent cleaning system and an intelligent heating system for it.
Besides, with the precision manufacturing capability accumulated in the field of optical communication and the advanced process equipment laboratory, Huawei has completed the establishment of the first pilot production line for automotive-grade LiDAR, which will be oriented to the million-level mass production demand, and will advance according to the annual production capacity of 100,000 sets/line to meet the future mass production demand.