Control light bulb with your smartphone
BARCELONA: Want to dim the lights in your living room but don’t feel like getting up from the sofa?
China’s Xiaomi, the world’s fourth-largest smartphone maker, presented a new connected light bulb — the Mi LED Smart Bulb — that lets users control light colour and brightness via an app on their phone or Amazon’s voicecontrolled assistant Alexa.
Exhibited during the Mobile World Congress, the light bulb offers 16 million colour options.
South Korean robotics company Torooc turned heads with its tiny companion robot called Liku which walks and expresses emotions like a human with its large eyes.
The robot, just 50 cm tall and weighing 1.1 kg, has a forehead camera that allows it to pick up on our cues to strike up a rapport.
If you walk into a room and greet Liku, it will tilt its head toward you, make eye contact and smile.
Its cartoon-like eyes can express “emotions” including surprise, happiness and sadness, or appear to be sleeping.
If you point a camera at it, Liku will smile and strike a stylish pose with its arms and legs — even when you take a selfie with it.
“We designed LIKU to have an adorable appearance, to elicit positive feelings. When people look at Liku, they smile naturally. We hope Liku will be your first robot friend,” said Torooc chief marketing officer JaeHee Chang.
The company plans to start shipping the robot early next year. It is priced at around US$2,500 (RM10,500).
Spanish startup Dinbeat presented a harness for dogs dubbed the DinbeatPRO which uses sensors to monitor breathing, body temperature, barking activity level and body position.
While there are many activity monitors for pets geared for pet owners, the harness was specifically designed to be used by veterinarians treating hospitalised dogs.
“Right now medical devices which were designed for humans, which are much more complicated and have cables, are used and the animal must be sedated to use them,” said Dinbeat project manager Marina Gomez de Tejada.
Meanwhile, the Netherlandsbased startup Travis presented small earbuds that are capable of translating conversations between people speaking different languages in real time.
The Artificial Intelligence powered device synchs to computing in the cloud to translate any combination of 105 languages.
At the expo, mixed virtual reality, 5G and AI have also dominated the agenda. Thanks to the HoloLens 2 people can interact with holograms - for now, it is only available for commercial use, but it will be released to the public eventually.
“Obviously there is a dream, there is world, where we are really going towards democratising this kind of technology to all users. I think it will take us a little bit of time still,” Charlie Han, Product Manager for Microsoft HoloLens 2 said.
5G and AI also allow the next generation of robots to play the piano, make coffee or form a dance troupe.
“We are trying to build a robot as good as the human body, and our human body is a marvel from a robotics perspective: it is agile, strong, soft, dynamic, self-repairing so we are trying to imitate our muscles and the structure of our body,” Simon Trumel, robotic engineer said.
While the glitzy stands of mobile giants like Samsung and Huawei hog the spotlight of the event’s vast centre, dozens of regionally focused or mostly unknown handset makers also take part each year.
“This is a concentrated market... but there is a not insignificant slice of it which dozens of manufacturers fight for,” said Forrester tech analyst Thomas Husson.
The world’s three biggest smartphone makers — Samsung, Apple, Huawei — accounted for just over half of all handset sales last year, according to research firm IDC.
For some little-known handset makers the goal at the fair is to sell themselves to potential new clients outside of their local catchment area.
“We don’t compete with Huawei, Apple or Samsung, we want to provide similar smartphone specifications to a lower segment market at the right price,” said Mario Pintar, marketing director for Croatian smartphone maker Noa.
While some smaller firms are happy to make white brands, others like Z-tech aim to become the next Xiaomi or OPPO, two Chinese firms which were the fourth and fifth largest smartphone sellers in the world last year, with their own brands.
“We are taking part in Mobile World Congress to show our own products and win new customers in the entire world,” a Z-tech spokesman said.
With the global smartphone saturated, this will be no easy task. Worldwide smartphone sales fell 4.1 per cent in 2018, the second yearly decline in a row, according to IDC.
“To break out you either have to bet on a niche market, or cut costs, or seek to grow, as Huawei, Xiaomi ore OnePlus did,” said Chevallier.
Obviously there is a dream, there is world, where we are really going towards democratising this kind of technology to all users. I think it will take us a little bit of time still. – Charlie Han, Product Manager for Microsoft HoloLens 2