Japan-based company Nissha Co., Ltd. which operates in production and sales of industrial materials, devices, life innovation, information communication and green business has developed Mui, an interactive display as its foray into the smart home industry. Mui is a wooden panel with a built-in touch sensor and a wireless sensor that can be used to control lights, change temperature and work as a display to show messages, time, weather, temperature, and much more all on your fingertips.
The Mui touch-interactive display is compatible with Net LED and Philips Hue bulbs and is expected to work with more smart lights in future. Currently, the smart home device is just a prototype, so its companion app along with IFTTT and Alexa integrations are still in the development phase. For now, it uses myThings, an IoT service by Yahoo Japan.
Justifying its name which is a Japanese word that depicts a natural sense of mind, inactivity, idleness, Mui wooden touchscreen display is designed to be “out of sight until needed, and out of mind until utilized.” In essence, it’s just an elegant piece of wood when idle although, it responds to your presses by displaying information obtained from connected cloud-based services.
The Verge reports that they had seen the wooden version in real and it’s really gorgeous. There are also other options including mirror glass, red fabric, and marble. Most probably, it will be launched through a crowd-funding campaign around June 2018, with price ranging between US$900 to US$1,200.
Till now, we have seen wood being used as a construction material, for making furniture and most commonly for energy, but Mui is an absolutely unique concept that deals with utilizing a wood piece to display useful information. It would become even more convenient when you will be able to command it through voice-commands, so it’s your decision that whether you want a smart home controller equipped with a minimalist touch display for that heavy price even when there are much cheaper options like Amazon Echo Show.
