By: Dennis Burger, Editor – Z-Wave.com
Sometimes the smart home can feel pretty futuristic, but often new tech comes along that is aimed at making every day task much simpler.
Can you imagine walking into your house, and quickly gesturing at your wall to turn your lights and music on? You can, courtesy of a new product from FIBARO. SWIPE, an ingenious new Z-Wave gesture-based wireless control pad, could change the way you interact with your home.
With the addition of AI and voice control platforms like Amazon Echo changing how people control and interact with their home technology, Z-Wave adds a new kind of control to the smart home that feels like magic.
SWIPE works by reading the motion of your hand over its surface—either left to right, right to left, up, down, or in a wax-on/wax-off circular motion. Each of those motions is tied to an independent scene in your Z-Wave home control system, so the sort of magic that SWIPE unlocks in your own home is really up to you.
A SWIPE mounted by your front door could activate your alarm system and turn off all your lights with a downward gesture on your way out, then fire up your Welcome Home lighting scene with an upward gesture when you return home.
Up and down gestures in the family room could raise and lower the volume of your music, while left and right swipes skip between tracks in your favorite playlist. The possibilities are nearly limitless.
Further enhancing the illusion of magic is the fact that SWIPE can be mounted pretty much anywhere: behind drywall or wallpaper, beneath a countertop, inside a picture frame, on the underside of your desk.
Since you don’t actually have to touch SWIPE to activate it, the sensing technology inside can record gestures through solid surfaces.
Although voice and gesture control are on the rise, there’s still a time and place for smartphone app control, touchscreens, and physical light switches.
Gesture control is merely the latest in a growing trend of alternative control methods, like the Amazon Echo’s voice control, designed to make your smart home more responsive, more intuitive, and more accessible. You can find resources on all things smart home on Z-Wave.com.
