Home Smart Friend - Rodi
People who want to live alone never deserve to be lonely, living alone should never equal to alone.
Client
N/A
Year
2022
Today, many people choose to live solo, as they recognize the benefits of not living with anyone. They can have full control of the space in their home, and all the freedom of what to do at home.
“Living alone with no roommate means you can even be naked at home.”
However, everyone has downtime, despite the benefits of living alone, people living alone means they have to face the negative energy by themselves, as friends and family might not be available due to the time or distance.
“It usually at night, but I knew this could happen, it is like the unavoidable cost, we just have to bear with it.”
The cost of living alone can be categorized into physical and emotional.
Physical cost is related to time and finances, which include taking more time and effort to meet with family or friends, people have to purchase the tools and equipment that they need, and putting more time on maintain the living space.
The emotional cost is emotional instability as what bonded people to a place is not a condo or a house, but the people they knew in that place. Living alone gave them the freedom of moving around, which also left all their connection behind. People might also lack a sense of belonging from various perspectives, some of them might only feel comfortable and settled when they are at home, where the only place they feel the connection in that city is their home; or the time when they stay with their belongings, as those are the only things that might not change after moving and moving.
These pain points can be relieved by creating the connection between people while not taking their time away to meet each other, and assisting with their daily tasks to make it easier, while also giving emotional support or accompanying with no pressure on socializing.
How to relieve the pain?
Maintain space and time for private use;
No stress from socialising or the solution;
Reduce negative feelings;
Keep the user at top priority;
MUST
Feels like communicating in face-to-face;
Interact like real life;
Actively assist the user;
Actively learn and communicate with the user;
SHOULD
COULD
Support the user anytime and anywhere;
A lively system that is not robotic style;
What technologies can lead to the “pain killer”?
High-speed network is critical. It is not only allowing people to connect in real-time, but also makes different methods of seeing each other become possible and reduces the hardware requirement.
AI can improve and stablize the quality. Also it allows the communication move beyond what was captured by devices, and provide various possibility of the application.
AR, but not limited to it, not only provide visual communication, but also take it into the real world and provide an immersive experience. For connecting with people, this brings them closer together.
While existing methods of connecting people already bring people the audio, and AR bring into the advanced visual experience, haptic simulation can take people one more step forward, to allow interaction with objects, surroundings, and people.
From the beginning of the distanced connection, people connected and communicated by writing a letter and sending it out by postal service then waiting for days and weeks to get the replies in their handwriting.
The next generation moved toward phone calls, which enable the audio part, and people can communicate as talking in person. After that, the world has the early version of social media, including email. It is a digital short letter with various additional features, but it brings out real-time communication or relatively real-time, with a visual experience. Of course, it developed later on.
Moving forward, people connected with others by video call. At this point, people can see each other, and talk with each other like in-person communication, but on a flat image. After all these, we can expect the distanced communication will move toward AR, which not only allows people to see each other but also sees them in the real world.
However, it has no different than video calls, except for the advanced visual experience. That determines that the methods will continue to evaluate, to simulate the interaction, which leads to AR calls with haptic simulation. It allows people to interact and feel with the person they are connected with and interact with the objects that are shared.
While the system incorporates AI, to improve quality and simulation. It does not end with the calls.
AI can turn into a digital character, like a friend, or a roommate that does not have to socialize to maintain relationships.
It assists the daily task, actively supporting the user everyday but observing and learning from operating. Emotionally, it continuously monitors the condition of the user and disturbs the user from negative emotions.
As a communication application, it can also connect and assist the user when they are away from home, by connecting with their devices carry-on, and communicating in a way that humans would do, rather than robotic notification.
