The world's first AI-native smart residence: What does a home that has become an intelligent life form look like?
AI Knocks on the Door of Home: The Residence Has Reached a Rewriting Moment
Devices in a home are getting smarter, yet people are increasingly acting like system administrators.
Sometimes, when you get home and want to sit quietly on the sofa for a while, you still have to pick up your phone first to properly arrange all the devices in the house one by one.
Lights, air conditioners, fresh air systems, and curtains all have their own control logic. The more devices there are and the richer the functions, the higher the coordination cost in the home space. Many of the so-called "smart homes" still require people to decide when to turn on and off the devices, and complete control across different access points.
The industry once used "scenarios" to alleviate this problem. Pre-combining a set of fixed actions for scenarios like returning home, leaving home, and watching movies did reduce part of the operations. But life does not run according to several preset modes.
Large language models have brought new changes. The interaction between people and devices has become more natural, users need to memorize fewer commands, and devices can be called more flexibly. However, large language models will not automatically turn all the devices in a house into a cohesive home. Devices, data and control capabilities are still scattered in different systems. AI can understand a sentence, but may not necessarily understand what is happening in the entire space at this moment.
As AI begins to enter the physical world, residences have also become part of the factors that determine whether AI capabilities can be implemented. For AI to understand and manage a home, the space itself needs to be able to be perceived, computed and controlled in a unified manner. The long-standing fragmentation of smart homes is no longer just a hassle in operation, it has begun to limit what AI can do in the home scenario.
On September 7, at the autumn technology launch event held in the H3 Design High Ground Pavilion of Modern Shanghai Design Week, Habitat presented its answer: a new underlying architecture for residences, the AI-native smart home underlying architecture "GAIA", as well as the supporting software hub, hardware base, environmental system and design tools.
Shen Yanan, Founder of Habitat, Launched the GAIA Architecture
Shen Yanan, Founder of Habitat, divides the evolution of smart residences into L1 to L4 stages.
L1 solves the productization of residences: it reconstructs the past decoration mode of decentralized procurement and combined delivery into a complete product integrating software and hardware. The previous generation of Habitat products completed this step, and connected home agents on this basis.
At the L2 stage, the starting point of residence design is further changed. AI evolves from an additional capability to the underlying design of the residence. R&D personnel need to first figure out how to make a home more comfortable, healthier and more energy-saving, and then reorganize perception, computing power, communication, control, energy and devices accordingly.
This also constitutes the more essential watershed between the AI-native smart residence released this time and traditional smart homes: accessing large language models has become increasingly easy, and the real difficulty lies in reorganizing the entire residence around AI.
From this moment on, what Habitat is trying to change is no longer how smart a single device is, but whether the residence itself can become a unified and operating smart system.
The Basic Unit of Intelligence Shifts From Individual Devices to the Entire Home
After the basic unit of intelligence shifts from individual devices to the entire home, the problem also changes: What capabilities should a home that truly operates as a whole possess?
Habitat named the underlying architecture of its AI-native smart residence "GAIA". The name comes from the Gaia hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock: the Earth is not composed of isolated parts, but a whole that can continuously adjust and maintain dynamic balance.
Habitat borrowed this metaphor. In the GAIA architecture, switches, lights, air, energy, sensors and intelligent agents are integrated into the same spatial system, performing the functions of different "organs" respectively to collaboratively complete perception, decision-making and execution.
Such a home needs to answer three questions: can it actively respond to the environmental changes in front of it? Can it continue to upgrade after being lived in for five or ten years? As its capabilities become more and more complex, can users worry less instead?
Habitat summarizes them respectively as: Self-adaptation, Evolvability, and Non-perceptibility.
When guests come to the house and sit around for a hot pot meal, the environment in the room changes. Steam rises from the pot, and the temperature, particulate matter and carbon dioxide concentration change accordingly. For people who are eating and chatting, these parameters usually do not enter their field of vision until someone feels hot or stuffy.
In traditional residences, someone often needs to free up their hands to adjust the air conditioner and turn on the fresh air system at this time. It is not difficult to answer what each device can do, the difficulty lies in who will organize them.
The AI Ultra-constant Climate System released by Habitat this time aims to take over this coordination work. It continuously perceives the state of the space, and links the fresh air, exhaust air and temperature control in combination with people's positions, activities and environmental changes. Constant temperature, constant humidity, constant oxygen, constant cleanliness and constant quietness are the five dimensions that this system focuses on. When applied to a meal scenario, it makes the environment keep up with people's activities, and minimizes interruption of the conversation at the dining table.
Structure Diagram of AI Ultra-constant Climate System
After the dinner party, family members go to rest one after another, and the environment management does not end accordingly. The system will continue to adjust the operation strategy to find a balance between comfort and energy consumption. And when people leave home, the adjustment still proceeds in the background.
Shen Yanan calls this environmental experience that continuously follows people "comfort bubble". The self-adaptation of AI-native residences lies in making the home keep up with these daily changes: complex parameters and adjustment processes are kept in the background, and what users feel is only more stable air quality, more suitable temperature and humidity, and a quieter environment.
A meal tests whether the residence can respond to immediate changes, and when the time is extended to the fifth or tenth year after moving in, the test is different. New members are added to the family, the purpose of the room changes, and the devices on the market have been updated for several generations. People's needs are always changing, but the house often stays at the day when the decoration is completed.
The life cycle of a residence lasts for decades, but panels, circuits and devices are usually basically fixed when the decoration is completed. GAIA tries to leave room for the house to continue to grow: the home computing hub is responsible for local computing, storage and system operation, and the space controller integrates multiple power supply methods and communication protocols into a unified architecture. Panels can be redefined, devices can be continuously expanded, and the fixed binding between software and hardware is gradually broken. When adding new sensors, environmental devices or embodied intelligent products in the future, there is an opportunity to continue to use this base without retransforming the entire residence.
This base also undertakes more daily work. After the power consumption data of key devices is collected in a unified manner, "Xiao Qi" can generate energy consumption analysis to further optimize the energy usage of the whole house. After the house is delivered, the functions can still be continuously expanded. The "evolvability" mentioned by Habitat answers that when life changes in a few years, this home can still keep up.
However, the more things a home can do, it does not mean that people living in it should know more. The person sitting on the sofa may just casually say: "It's a bit stuffy."
The HClaw home intelligent agent "Xiao Qi" will understand your needs. It acts as the spatial decision-making hub, combining sound source positioning, human body sensing, voiceprint recognition and spatial state to judge who is where, and then adjust the corresponding devices. The same sentence "The room is a bit dark" can also become the starting point for adjusting lights and curtains.
What users express is their feelings, and the residence is responsible for converting them into actions. The former "system administrator" who switched back and forth between different access points finally gets the chance to put their attention back on life.
This "non-perceptibility" also extends to the immediate space. Habitat integrates the spatial control terminal with the wall design to reduce complex panels; the wind and water systems are hidden in the ground and spatial structure as much as possible; environmental devices are combined with storage. The presence of machines is gradually weakened, and the intelligence of the residence continues to perceive, adjust and evolve in these invisible places.
Spatial Interactive Terminal Sensor Integrated With the Ceiling Structure
From Design to Delivery, AI Begins to Rewrite the Way Homes Are Created
After the underlying architecture of the residence is redefined, another more practical problem arises: Can such residences still be designed and delivered in the traditional way?
The large home industry has long been highly dependent on human experience. To complete a residence from demand to implementation, multiple links such as design, product, supply chain and construction need to coordinate back and forth between house type, function, aesthetics, materials, cost and site conditions. The more links there are, the easier the information is to lose; the more complex the demand is, the stronger the dependence on personal experience will be.
Compared with the consumer electronics and automotive industries that have formed a mature industrial system, the supply side of residences is still obviously dependent on manual experience. AI also needs to enter the design, data and delivery processes to promote the change of the production mode of "building homes".
This is also the real difficulty in the productization of residences: product definitions can be unified, but if design, product configuration and construction still operate separately, the complexity will also expand as the scale increases.
Habitat hopes to use AI to continue to transform this link. The ANDI released this time is an end-to-end AI interactive residence design Agent. It is built on Habitat's existing house type, product and delivery data, and tries to put the previously scattered house type understanding, spatial design, effect presentation, product configuration and delivery information into the same data system.
After users import the house type, ANDI can identify the original structure and generate a floor plan, then adjust the room functions, spatial layout and product selection according to natural language, and generate a browsable VR real scene at the same time, allowing users to see their future home at the design stage.
A more important change occurs after the rendering is completed. ANDI will synchronously generate a full information model covering the relationship between space, products and materials, and generate the corresponding product configuration list. Therefore, the design data can continue to enter the supply chain and delivery links, without the need for repeated disassembly, translation and re-entry between different teams.
The unified data base reduces repeated sorting and information loss between teams, and allows designers to devote more time to links that require professional judgment. According to Habitat's vision, the design response time can be shortened from the day level to the minute level, and the dependence on the experience of individual designers will also be reduced; after it is open to consumers in the future, users can even directly participate in the design and adjustment of their own space.
When demands, design schemes, product configurations and delivery data are truly connected, residence design has also begun to transform from a one-time professional service to an iterable production process that can directly enter delivery.
A necessary step for the productization of residences is to gradually transform the judgments and processes that previously relied on personal experience into capabilities that the system can identify, compute and execute.
Technology Steps Back to the Background, Life Returns to the Center
An AI-native residence should ultimately not be a technology exhibition hall.
No matter how complex the underlying architecture is, what users really feel is still whether the air is fresh, the light is comfortable, the temperature is appropriate, and the night is quiet. Only when technology is transformed into these daily experiences can it truly integrate into life.
At the launch site, the immersive aesthetic space "Ease Residence" designed by Chi Wing Lo gave a more intuitive answer. The space takes spring, summer, autumn and winter as the clue, and integrates woodwork, air, light and water into the same experience. A large number of technical capabilities released by Habitat this time are hidden in it, and rarely occupy the field of vision in the form of devices — because people's feelings are the center of this space.
This is also consistent with the logic presented in the entire launch event: The more complex the system is, the fewer things users need to understand.
Just as "Xiao Qi" can handle more complex intentions, users only need to express their feelings; the space controller undertakes more device relationships, and the switches on the wall can be simpler; AI Ultra-constant continuously perceives and judges in the background, and what users finally feel is only more comfortable temperature and humidity and a quieter night.
But for residences, what is really important is not just being more comfortable at a certain moment.
A house often accompanies a family for ten years or even longer. In the past, the spatial relationships, devices and control methods were basically finalized when the decoration was completed, but people's needs are always changing. Family members will increase, life rhythm will change, and new devices and new demands will continue to emerge.
AI-native residences try to endow homes with this ability to change: continuous perception, continuous learning, continuous upgrading, and adjusting along with the family. This exactly echoes the meaning behind the name "GAIA" — The reason why a system can maintain balance for a long time is its continuous feedback and adjustment.
The home in the future may also be like this. Intelligence does not need to be seen or operated repeatedly. It keeps perception, judgment and adjustment in the background, and leaves comfort, freedom and ease to life.