Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

"Matter" is a technical specification published by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), an international organization.

On November 3 (Dutch local time), CSA held a Matter 1.0 global media conference in Amsterdam and a Chinese media conference in Shenzhen on November 4, Beijing time to introduce Matter to the global media and IoT industry and consumers, and to promote the wider application of Matter protocol.

During the conference, Sina Digital communicated with Tobin Richardson, CEO of CSA Connection Standards Alliance, about Matter technology and application scenarios.

Three years have passed since the establishment of the specification to the launch of the first generation of Matter. What specific work has CSA done in these three years? in tal about that topic, Tobin said,"it's true that we negotiated with a lot of company to get them involved."

Tobin, as a drafter and facilitator of technical standards, understands the importance of this. He said that Matter needs the support of these big companies to succeed,"because their scale and influence are too big." Matter wants them to join in.

The relevant working group has been studying and analyzing the claims of these companies for the past two and a half years. So he concluded that "analyzing requirements,""testing requirements," and building the infrastructure used by the product are all very important and the most time-consuming parts.

CSA carried out a total of 9 test activities during the development process, involving more than a dozen large companies to continuously test these functions, and then to modify the technical specifications again after the test.

The global strategy achieves diversity on the basis of unity. Today's conference is actually the beginning of Matter's commercialization.

Matter's goal is to be a globally applicable standard, which means that it is designed globally from the beginning, not in a country or region, and can be applied globally. This will of course increase the difficulty of promotion, but as mentioned earlier, CSA has been preparing for three years. Unlike other previous standards, CSA also pays attention to "diversity" in addition to "unification". From the perspective of results, their members have sufficient diversity, including geographical diversity and product type diversity.

Matter's first devices are familiar to users, such as lighting control sensors, door locks, etc., so that these commonly used devices are interconnected first, and then gradually expanded to more categories.

Tobin made it clear that new areas would be announced "in the coming weeks," provided they had at least, say, five or so manufacturers.

In order to maintain diversity, CSA has three regional groups to identify the requirements of different regions and expand these equipment categories, namely China, Europe and the United States. After analyzing the needs of different regions and integrating them into common standards, Tobin said, for example, some manufacturers in Sweden and China may provide some features, and integration ensures that manufacturers in the United States can also meet these features through common standards.

Change the status quo to establish ecology + break ecology from standard to specific product. For users, cognition is actually "brand" rather than "agreement." They may have used Xiaomi or Google products before, and the protocol may be Zigbee or Wifi. The latter is the status quo, the former is actually the problem CSA wants to solve, and the entry point is the user experience.

"A lot of experiences aren't good enough right now," Tobin said, noting that different brands or products have different agreements. It is also because of this that Matter's advancement has an opportunity.

For smart home products that have already been launched, CSA can strive to support Matter through system updates (provided, of course, hardware support). If not, consider adding a new Matter gateway. CSA will provide a roadmap for these gateways to help companies carry out this work.

If that's how Matter builds ecosystems, another aspect is their attempt to break private ecosystems with open standards.

Consider the actual situation. There are also companies that try to build their own standards. And there are already quite a number of user groups and habits.

Tobin mentioned that their open standard goal is to break down barriers, not just to get customers through barriers, which can be said to provide a level playing field for all. At the same time, it also gives users more choices, such as A brand door locks and B brand smart lamps. Before, users may need two App to control them separately. If they can access the same ecosystem, users don't have to do "choose one from two" and can only choose the same products. In theory, it is possible for iPhone to control Google or Xiaomi's smart home devices. This is consistent with the diversity of ideas he advocates.

"I think manufacturers large and small can benefit from the Matter standard because it is an open standard and allows users to have more choices" - Tobin This sentence covers the advantages of Matter and the mission of Matter.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.