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Mixed Reality Interface for Smart Homes

Mixed Reality Interface for Smart Homes

https://immersive-home.org/news/11

Immersive Home is a hobby project of mine with the goal of envisioning on how the future of our Smart Homes could look like. I implemented an Mixed Reality Interface for XR Headsets like the Meta Quest 3 (made with Godot) for controlling your Smart Home. While it is an experimental project, my goal is to also make this available for everybody to use and with this release I'm finally at a point where I would say the experience is polished enough for more people to try it out.

Immersive Home connects to your Hub (currently Home Assistant) and enables you to interact with your devices in a completely new way. My motivation in building this app was that controlling your Smart Home with your Smartphone often is tedious in that it takes a lot of time to start the app, find the device you're looking for and then finally changing the state to the desired outcome. Dashboards are often called as a solution to this problem, but they don't fully solve the problem. You still have to remember where you placed what device in said dashboard, taking time to learn. This is especially problematic when friends, children or elderly people want to interact with your Smart Home using a Dashboard.

The solution to this problem is to map the virtual interfaces as naturally as possible to their physical counterpart. Meaning, if you want to control the blinds of a given window, you don't look for it inside an App or Dashboard, but just look at the physical window directly. This has several benefits, most notably also being able to simulate physical controls using hand tracking. Making the interaction easy to comprehend and remember.

There are a lot more benefits I didn't go over in this post, but if you're interested in learning more about the benefits of using Mixed Reality to control your Smart Home, feel free to join our Discord for further discussion.

Whats new in this Release

This release completely revamps the User Interface, going for a more futuristic approach and simpler design. Before buttons and other components felt a lot out of place to me. By making the interface mores subtle, components now feel more integrated into the surrounding environment and not as distracting.

The Mini View has also seen a few changes, notably adding interaction dots, allowing to interact with any device from any distance and doors. While it sounds trivial to have the option to draw doors into Immersive Home, until now the app was lacking this feature.

2 new entities made it into the release. The timer entity lets you interact with a timer in Home Assistant, adding a handy tool in chase that you want to get a reminder when your cake is ready. The weather entity allows you to preview the weather forecast for the day which is handy when being placed next to your bed.

The last notable addition is the ability to resize the Mini View and Entities, giving you more control in the appearance of your digital controls.

Changelog

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Nitwel/Immersive-Home/compare/v0.5.0...v0.6.0

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  "title": "Immersive Home − News: UI Overhaul, Timer and Weather Entities, Improved Mini View (Release v0.6.0)",
  "description": "Immersive Home is a hobby project of mine with the goal of envisioning on how the future of our Smart Homes could look like. I implemented an Mixed Reality Interface for XR Headsets like the Meta Quest 3...",
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  "content": "<div><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\"></iframe>\n<p>Immersive Home is a hobby project of mine with the goal of envisioning on how the future of our Smart Homes could look like. I implemented an Mixed Reality Interface for XR Headsets like the Meta Quest 3 (made with <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://godotengine.org/\">Godot</a>) for controlling your Smart Home. While it is an experimental project, my goal is to also make this available for everybody to use and with this release I'm finally at a point where I would say the experience is polished enough for more people to try it out.</p>\n<p>Immersive Home connects to your Hub (currently <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.home-assistant.io/\">Home Assistant</a>) and enables you to interact with your devices in a completely new way. My motivation in building this app was that controlling your Smart Home with your Smartphone often is tedious in that it takes a lot of time to start the app, find the device you're looking for and then finally changing the state to the desired outcome. Dashboards are often called as a solution to this problem, but they don't fully solve the problem. You still have to remember where you placed what device in said dashboard, taking time to learn. This is especially problematic when friends, children or elderly people want to interact with your Smart Home using a Dashboard.</p>\n<p>The solution to this problem is to map the virtual interfaces as naturally as possible to their physical counterpart. Meaning, if you want to control the blinds of a given window, you don't look for it inside an App or Dashboard, but just look at the physical window directly. This has several benefits, most notably also being able to simulate physical controls using hand tracking. 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