Home security is one of the more important aspects of the smart home, easily because it’s all about keeping that place you live in secure. It’s all in the name, and yet doing so is often a combination of cameras in different places, largely to give you many points of view.
Almost like you need to be “the guy in the chair”, security systems with multiple cameras can give you that for the front, back, and sides of the house, and yet still miss locations because each spot that needs looking after still has zones that will be missed.
You may not even need every part of your home covered, but chances are even if you’re looking after the front — the part where most home security initially covers — you’re missing parts because of the camera angle. Even with a wide angle camera, there is only so much the system can see.
Reolink’s approach for that has previously been to combine multiple cameras in one device, but you’ve needed a cord to keep it connected. All that data and capability came with a cable, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Announced at IFA recently, Reolink’s latest will go wire-free with both WiFi and a built-in solar panel, something we’ve begun to see in Reolink’s floodlight security cameras, among others.
The technology of the Omvi 2i Ultra uses a wide-angle 8 megapixel camera with a 5 megapixel pan-tilt camera in its own movable spot. A little bit of AI between the two will allow the smaller (and lower) 5 megapixel camera to move to track something when the larger (and slightly higher in position) 8 megapixel camera picks up on something, effectively covering the whole of a zone but using two cameras to get there.
Keeping it charged is a solar panel, but there’s also a 10,000mAh battery that can be detached and recharged, because clearly it needs power when there’s no sun in the sky, as well.
Working across this will be Reolink’s AI solution, ReoNeura, which is basically a local AI that can be trained to match specific scenarios, but doesn’t require a subscription, something that’s becoming a bit of a bugbear in the AI obsessed world we’re now in.
You only need to glance at the latest Google Home speaker, which changes its assistant and works better with a subscription specifically covering Google AI to see where this is all going. A change to a subscription-free approach is very in line with what Reolink offers, and we’re seeing it from competitors in the form of Ezviz, as well.
That said, Reolink will offer a home hub storage system to store those videos and let you use AI to quickly find events, though this will cost extra as a gadget.
There’s no word on pricing for the Omvi 2i Ultra just yet, though it is expected later this year in Australia, while the Home Hub model will be $259.99 when it’s released soon, too.
