The Heating of Artificial Intelligence Spurs Innovation in the Lighting Industry
AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, which is a major symbol of the rapid leap of artificial intelligence from independent thinking to deep thinking. The popularity of smart lighting stems from the rapid development of artificial intelligence. When artificial intelligence technology is combined with smart lighting, many surprising discoveries will be made. Smart lighting is a brand-new industry born along with the Internet of Things, and it is a segmented manifestation of object interconnection under the influence of the Internet. Smart lighting not only has the traditional lighting function, but also can realize automatic interaction and provide a more convenient, safer and more comfortable experience.
The traditional lighting supply chain system has been a self-contained system for a long time, with not much intersection with other categories. With the development of today's Internet of Things, smart lighting systems urgently need to build an overall system with other smart devices and realize interconnection with other devices. The traditional lighting industrial chain is no longer suitable for the smart lighting industry that requires a high degree of system integration. In the future, traditional lighting should transform and upgrade from the current business model of lighting fixture development to a systematic business model.
The popularity of smart lighting in the past one or two years stems from the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Not long ago, AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie, which is a major symbol of the rapid leap of artificial intelligence from independent thinking to deep thinking: machines, like the human brain, have the ability to think deeply, they can learn and upgrade by themselves, and make judgments and predictions on what happens through continuous learning. When we look at smart lighting combined with these cutting-edge technologies, we will make many surprising discoveries.
At present, the rapid iteration of technologies such as robots, speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing has provided significant technical support for smart lighting.
In Sengled's smart lighting system, technologies such as music, face recognition, and heat map analysis are integrated into LED lamps, so that the lighting has multiple "high-IQ" functions such as automatic statistics, automatic recognition, and behavior analysis, and will provide deeper system applications based on these functions.
Smart lighting does not exist independently. It will become a part of smart cities and smart homes and run through our work and life.
Smart city is a new concept in the process of urban development, but the construction of a smart city involves all aspects, and it is difficult to establish an effective and unified overall planning mechanism across the country. As lighting is the urban infrastructure, if intelligent connection can be realized first, it will effectively promote the construction and development of smart cities.
In addition to the intelligent life brought by high technology, smart cities also pay attention to the sustainable development of social economy, and smart lighting will help reduce energy consumption and facility maintenance costs, and contribute to smart cities.
The reduction of energy consumption is mainly due to the fact that the smart lighting system can make good use of natural light for lighting. In different locations of the city, due to weather changes, seasonal changes, and even different environments such as trees and buildings around street lamps, the demand for lighting is also different. If the entire city turns on the lights at the same time and turns them off at the same time, it will not only cause a lot of unnecessary energy consumption, but also cannot meet the lighting needs of all areas. This problem can be solved by adopting a smart lighting control system.
Using M2M technology, it can also realize monitoring and remote control of lighting facilities. When a street lamp has a problem somewhere, this node will send the fault message to the control center. After receiving the location message, the control center will immediately send an operator to the accident site, which avoids the time and cost of troubleshooting.
An important part of building a smart city is to ensure public security. In terms of security monitoring, this can be achieved through the combination of smart street lamps and high-definition cameras. Through the communication between the RFID chip installed on public facilities and the nearby street lamp pole, the geographical location of public facilities is analyzed, linked with the management background, and combined with on-site video capture and recording, timely information release and accident warning can be carried out.
If the camera can upload the data to the cloud platform for storage and analysis, it will provide strong video evidence when tracking criminals. In addition, when building a smart city, these video data can be analyzed to interpret road conditions and provide more convenient information for drivers and travelers.
When smart lighting is gradually popularized in urban infrastructure and the technology becomes more mature, more commercial places have begun to notice its application value, such as large office buildings or shopping malls and supermarkets.
The original intention of smart lighting is to meet people's needs. Using a smart lighting system in a commercial building can reduce energy consumption and help enterprises save costs on the one hand, and more importantly, it is a kind of humanistic care.
After adopting the smart lighting system, the system will automatically switch between various working conditions according to the situation. For example: in the morning when the light is sufficient, the system will dim or turn off the lights; in the area near the window, the system will intelligently use outdoor natural light.
Similarly, when the weather is sunny, the indoor lights will automatically dim; when the weather is overcast, the indoor lights will automatically brighten; when night falls, the system will automatically enter the evening working state and slowly adjust the lights in each area automatically. In this way, the staff in the building can all be in a comfortable light environment.
Different from commercial buildings, shopping malls and supermarkets hope to gain more passenger flow through smart lighting. Undoubtedly, good lighting can create a warm and comfortable environment and affect customers' shopping mood. However, it is not enough to rely only on lighting. Only when the smart lighting system is linked with other systems, such as the indoor environment adjustment system, to jointly improve the shopping mall environment, can it really exert its effect. For example, when the passenger flow in the mall increases, people will feel irritable and stuffy. At this time, by adjusting the light color (using cooler tones) and simultaneously linking to adjust the temperature of the air conditioner and the indoor temperature of the mall, a better shopping experience can be given to customers.
Compared with the application in public facilities and commercial fields, the application of smart lighting in home is still very limited, and it can even be said that the road to home application has encountered a bottleneck. For smart lighting to enter thousands of households, there is still a long way to go. To ignite this huge market that is bound to erupt, an excellent product is particularly important. Because only products that directly hit consumers' pain points can change users' cognition, cultivate users' habits, and let consumers open this market by themselves.
There are two crucial points for smart lighting products to catch consumers' attention.
First, be people-oriented and deliver a good experience. Intelligence can be the icing on the cake, but it cannot be a lifesaver. If a manufacturer of smart lighting equipment produces a product that does not even have a good basic lighting experience, what is the use of being smart?
In addition, most current smart home products, in the early stage of development, will fall into the blind pursuit of the word "intelligence". Blind function stacking and junk settings out of curiosity have been constantly complained by consumers, who feel they have wasted their money. Therefore, in the future, intelligent lighting products with smooth operation, energy saving, health and comfort, and focus on visual physiology will become the mainstream. Smooth operation means that there will be no switching freezes, unstable light sources and other phenomena that affect user experience during use; energy saving means that lamps can save electricity and energy consumption through functions such as light intensity adjustment and automatic turn-off when people leave; health and comfort means that lamps can create a light environment that conforms to visual physiological characteristics according to the environment of the household.
As a component of smart homes, for smart home products to truly become a rigid-demand market, it is necessary to have artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence can be said to be the soul of smart homes. We can see clues from the strategic layout of tech giants.
The world's four major technology companies, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple, are all actively promoting smart homes. Amazon's Echo is like the familiar "Trojan horse". It hides behind the guise of a wireless speaker, but in fact it can also control your smart home products, including lights, thermostats, and door locks, relying on your voice commands. Echo started controlling smart home products from light bulbs a long time ago.
The competition in the smart home and smart speaker market has actually started long ago, and with the official launch of Apple's HomePod, the competition has become even more intense. Basically, the entire smart speaker market was opened by Amazon Echo, then Google joined in with Google Home, and now Apple officially released HomePod at WWDC 2017, and the three main products have officially formed a three-way confrontation.
In short, intelligence research centered on human experience will become the mainstream, and will serve as the development direction of smart lighting for a long time in the future.
Summary: Although smart lighting has not yet formed a large-scale national consumer market at present, as long as smart lighting practitioners follow the trend and make continuous efforts, they can develop more excellent products that meet practical needs. The still-emerging smart lighting is the best access point for smart homes, smart cities, and the Internet of Things. The huge energy it contains will not only bring innovation to the entire lighting industry, but also have a great impact on lighting-related industries.