Fluid One on Kickstarter: the ultimate solution to control the smart home?

On Kickstarter a very ambitious project has just appeared: it is called Fluid One, and promises the solution to one of the biggest problems that the smart home sector has not yet completely solved, namely control. Between voice commands that are not always understood / interpreted correctly and the many apps with many / too many options that make their use unintuitive, the impression that the work required to turn off a simple light bulb is a bit excessive is justifiable. Fluid’s solution involves UWB technology.

Basically, the idea is this: to apply UWB repeaters in strategic points of the house in such a way that when the user points their iPhone towards a smart gadget, the relevant controls appear automatically and relevant. To further simplify the interaction, a series of gestures that do not require touch are also provided: for example, just shake the smartphone a couple of times, as if it were a magic wand, in the direction of a light bulb to turn it off. The Fluid app can also work in the background to perform automatic actions based on where you are – for example, turning on the light in the corridor when you walk through it, perhaps only after a certain time.

So Fluid is a combination of software – in fact, the official app – and hardware, that is the UWB repeaters (to which an optional hub can be added). It is worth noting that it is not necessary to have a repeater for every smart appliance: it is more a question of the size and organization of your house plan. However, you need several, and this is a problem especially when you consider the cost.

To say: up to four repeaters can be used for the main area, usually the living room, where there are more gadgets. A package of four repeaters costs about € 250 (and only for Early Birds on Kickstarter: the official price to the public will be € 400 approximately). It is true that in secondary areas, where there are generally fewer smart devices, the density of repeaters can be reduced (Fluid says that up to 3 secondary areas can be managed with a single repeater), but it is clear that it depends a lot on an individual case. ‘other. Plant costs for the entire home could skyrocket.

Fluid One will initially be available only for iPhones with UWB chips, which means all variants of the iPhone 11, 12 and 13; There are smartphones with UWB in the Android world as well, but developers say that a proper software infrastructure from Google is needed first. The developers aim to make as many products and ecosystems as possible compatible, and the list is already quite extensive – among the brands and protocols mentioned are Samsung’s SmartThings, Philips Hue, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, Alexa, iRobot, Logitech , Z-Wave, Ecobee, Sonos, Zigbee, Ring and many others. The plan is to also adopt Matter, developed by Google and Apple, which is currently the most credible candidate to become the only (or at least leading) industry standard.

There remains the problem of always having to keep your smartphone in your pocket; perhaps in the future the integration of UWB chips in smartwatches could represent the decisive step forward, but it does not seem like something that will happen anytime soon. After all, it is also true that Fluid One will not arrive before the beginning of 2024, at least according to what the developers say. And it must be taken into account that delays and postponements are quite common in these situations.