The world's first AI-native smart residence: What is a home that has become an intelligent living entity like?
AI Knocks on the Door: The Home Is Due for a Rewrite
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 and configure every device in the house one by one.
Lights, air conditioners, fresh air systems, and curtains all have their own independent control logic. The more devices there are and the richer their functions, the higher the coordination cost in the home space. Many so-called "smart homes" still require people to decide when to turn devices on and off, and complete control operations across different entry points.
The industry once used "scenarios" to alleviate this problem. Pre-setting combined fixed actions for modes like returning home, leaving home, and watching movies did reduce part of the operations. But life never runs according to several pre-defined modes.
Large models have brought new changes. The communication between people and devices has become more natural, users need to memorize fewer instructions, and devices can be called more flexibly. But large models will not automatically turn a room full of devices into a real home. Devices, data and control capabilities are still scattered across different systems. AI can understand a single sentence, but it 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 foundation that determines whether AI capabilities can be implemented. For AI to understand and manage a home, the space itself needs to be able to be perceived, calculated and controlled in a unified manner. The long-existing fragmentation of smart homes is no longer just a trivial operation inconvenience, it has begun to limit what AI can do in the family scenario.
On September 7, at the autumn technology launch event held at the H3 Design Highland Pavilion of Shanghai Design Week, Habitat presented its solution: a new underlying architecture for residences, the AI-native smart home underlying architecture "Gaia", as well as its supporting software hub, hardware base, environmental system and design tools.
Shen Yanan, founder of Habitat, released the Gaia architecture
Shen Yanan, founder of Habitat, divides the evolution of smart residences into L1 to L4 stages.
L1 solves the problem of residential productization: it reconstructs the decoration model of scattered procurement and combined delivery in the past 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 design starting point of residences is further changed. AI is no longer an additional capability, but has entered the underlying design of the residence. R&D personnel first need to figure out how to make a home more comfortable, healthier and more energy-efficient, and then reorganize perception, computing power, communication, control, energy and devices accordingly.
This also forms the more essential watershed between the AI-native smart residence released this time and traditional smart homes: accessing large models has become increasingly easy, and the real difficulty is to reorganize 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 intelligent 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 core problem also changes: what capabilities should a home that truly operates as a whole have?
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 borrows this metaphor. In the Gaia architecture, switches, lights, air systems, energy systems, sensors and intelligent agents are integrated into the same space system, undertaking the functions of different "organs" respectively, and collaboratively complete perception, decision-making and execution.
Such a home needs to answer three questions: can it actively respond to the immediate environmental changes? Can it continue to upgrade after being occupied 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 imperceptibility.
When guests come to the house and everyone sits 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 attract their attention until someone feels hot and someone feels 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 figure out what each device can do, but the difficulty lies in who organizes all these devices together.
The AI Super-constant Climate System released by Habitat this time attempts to take over this coordination work. It continuously perceives the state of the space, combines the position, activities of people and environmental changes, and links the fresh air, exhaust air and temperature control systems. Constant temperature, constant humidity, constant oxygen, constant cleanliness and constant quietness are the five dimensions that this system focuses on. In the scenario of a meal, it makes the environment keep up with people's activities, and minimizes interruption to the conversation at the dining table.
Structure diagram of the AI Super-constant Climate System
After the dinner, the family members go to rest one after another, and the environmental management does not end. The system will continue to adjust its operation strategy to find a balance between comfort and energy consumption. Even when people leave home, the adjustment is still running in the background.
Shen Yanan calls this continuous people-following environmental experience a "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 left 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 and tenth year after moving in, the test becomes different. New members are added to the family, the purpose of some rooms 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 state 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 growing: 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 a chance to continue using this base without retransforming the entire residence.
This base also undertakes more daily work. After the power consumption data of key devices is collected uniformly, "Xiao Qi" can generate energy consumption analysis to further optimize the energy use of the whole house. After the house is delivered, its functions can still be continuously expanded. The "evolvability" mentioned by Habitat answers the question of whether the home can keep up when life changes in a few years.
However, the more things a home can do, it does not mean that the people living in it should know more. The person sitting on the sofa may just say casually: "It feels a little stuffy."
The HClaw home intelligent agent "Xiao Qi" will understand your needs. It acts as the space decision-making hub, combining sound source positioning, human body sensing, voiceprint recognition and space state to judge who is speaking and where they are, and then adjust the corresponding devices. The same sentence "The room is a little dark" can also become the starting point for adjusting the lights and curtains.
Users express their feelings, and the residence is responsible for converting them into actions. The "system administrator" who used to switch back and forth between different entry points finally gets the chance to focus on life again.
This "imperceptibility" also extends to the current space. Habitat integrates the space control terminal with the wall design to reduce complex panels; the wind and water systems are hidden in the ground and space structure as much as possible; environmental devices are combined with storage. The sense of presence of machines is gradually weakened, and the intelligence of the residence continues to perceive, adjust and evolve in these invisible places.
Space interactive terminal sensor integrated with the ceiling structure
From Design to Delivery, AI Begins to Rewrite the Way Homes Are Created
After the underlying logic of residences is redefined, another more practical problem arises: can such residences still be designed and delivered in traditional ways?
The large home furnishing industry has long been highly dependent on human experience. To turn a residential demand into a finished product, multiple links including design, product, supply chain and construction need to repeatedly coordinate between house type, function, aesthetics, materials, cost and site conditions. The more links there are, the easier it is for information to be lost; the more complex the demand, the stronger the dependence on personal experience.
Compared with the consumer electronics and automotive industries which have formed a mature industrial system, the residential supply side 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 method of "building homes".
This is also the real difficulty of residential productization: product definitions can be unified, but if design, product configuration and construction still operate independently, the complexity will be amplified as the scale expands.
Habitat hopes to use AI to continue transforming this entire link. ANDI released this time is an end-to-end AI interactive residential design Agent. It is built on Habitat's existing house type, product and delivery data, and tries to integrate the previously scattered house type understanding, space 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, space layout and product selection according to natural language, and generate a browsable VR scene at the same time, allowing users to see their future home at the design stage.
More important changes take place after the renderings are 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 spend more time on links that require professional judgment. According to Habitat's vision, the design response time can be shortened from days to minutes, and the dependence on the experience of a single designer 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, residential design has begun to shift from a one-time professional service to an iterative production process that can be directly connected to delivery.
A necessary step for residential productization is to gradually convert the judgments and processes that used to be completed relying on personal experience into capabilities that the system can identify, calculate and execute.
Technology Retreats Behind the Scenes, Life Returns to the Center
An AI-native residence should never be a technology exhibition hall in the end.
No matter how complex the underlying architecture is, what users really feel is still whether the air is fresh, whether the light is comfortable, whether the temperature is appropriate, and whether it is quiet at night. Only when technology is converted into these daily experiences can it truly integrate into life.
At the launch site, the immersive aesthetic space "Yishe" designed by Chi Wing Lo gives a more intuitive answer. Taking spring, summer, autumn and winter as the clue, the space 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 people's sight in the form of devices - because people's feelings are the center of this space.
This is also consistent with the logic presented by 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 correlations, and the switches on the wall can be simpler; the AI Super-constant system 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 usually accompanies a family for ten years or even longer. In the past, space relationships, devices and control methods were basically fixed 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 give homes the ability to change: continuous perception, continuous learning, continuous upgrading, and adjust together with the family. This exactly echoes the meaning behind the name "Gaia" — a system can maintain long-term balance by relying on continuous feedback and adjustment.
The home in the future may also be like this. Intelligence does not need to be seen, nor does it need to be operated repeatedly. It leaves perception, judgment and adjustment in the background, and leaves comfort, freedom and ease to life.