Samsung Ballie is a rolling smart home hub with a built-in projector

Samsung first revealed Ballie — its rolling smart home hub — at CES 2020. Now, at CES 2024, the adorable robot is making a triumphant return, this time sporting a new built-in projector. Samsung didn’t have a physical Ballie roving around at CES, but the team showed off a home bot demonstration video, revealing how the robot has evolved over the years. If you’re unfamiliar with Ballie, think of it as a roving smart home hub, capable of taking orders from you and syncing with the rest of your smart home. Along with dishing out commands to your connected gadgets, it can serve as a patrolling security guard, giving you a live stream of your home while at work or on vacation. The big addition to Ballie at CES 2024 is its new projector. This allows it to cast videos to the floor, wall, or ceiling based on the viewer’s position. Samsung says Ballie can detect your posture and facial position, using this information to determine how (and where) it should project its images. The demo video showed Ballie projecting a video on the ground to distract a mischievous dog, projecting a workout video to the ceiling during an abs workout, and casting a work meeting to a wall for a person working from home. Samsung didn’t reveal a release date or pricing for Ballie, though it’s likely to be quite expensive. The Enabot EBO X, another home bot that connects to your smart home and serves as a security guard, costs a staggering $1,000. Since Ballie packs in an additional projector and comes from reputable Samsung, expect it to carry a much larger price tag. We wouldn’t be surprised to see it align more closely with Amazon Astro — a home bot currently only available by invitation and costs $1,600. Here’s hoping that Ballie makes an in-person appearance at events later this year and that it gets a release date that’s not too far into the future. Along with Ballie, Samsung used CES 2024 to debut big changes to SmartThings and show off a futuristic lineup of smart home devices powered by AI. Nanoleaf is one of the biggest names in smart lights, offering a variety of bulbs, panels, and even a unique skylight with support for over 16 million colors. That lineup is expanding today with the launch of the Nanoleaf Rope Light and Nanoleaf Solar Garden Light — two striking new products that look like an excellent way to bring a pop of color into your home. The Nanoleaf Solar Garden Light is arguably the most exciting of the two, as the company hasn’t ventured into the outdoor space too often. Sold as a two-pack for $50, the Garden Light is Nanoleaf’s first-ever solar-powered lighting solution. Built with an IP65 weatherproof rating, eight LED branches that splay out from a central stem, a built-in daylight sensor to toggle the lights on and off, and support for a variety of RGB colors plus tunable whites, it should make a fun companion for most outdoor spaces. From its inception, Matter promised to take the disparate walled gardens of smart home technology and unite them under a single protocol. Its purpose was to allow different ecosystems to interact with one another; for example, an Alexa-specific device could work with Google Home and vice versa. The protocol was first launched in 2019 under the name Connected Home over IP (CHIP), but rebranded in 2021 to Matter. At the same time as the Matter rebrand, the Zigbee Alliance — one of the initial members of the collaboration alongside Amazon, Apple, Google, and Samsung — renamed itself to the Connectivity Standards Alliance, or CSA. The CSA intended for Matter to launch in 2020, but numerous delays pushed the launch back to late 2021, and then later to the fall of 2022, citing the COVID-19 pandemic as the primary culprit. Say goodbye to (some) smart home woes. New user-facing features are coming to Matter that will make it easier than ever to set up your smart home and circumvent some of the more finicky, frustrating parts of adding new devices. The features come as part of the 1.4.1 specification announced today by the Connectivity Standards Alliance. The most useful feature of this update is Multi-Device Setup QR Code. Some smart devices (like a pack of lightbulbs) currently require you to scan each bulb individually and set it up in-app before moving on to the next. Not only is this time-consuming, but you often have to scan the code while the device is powered on. Since the QR code is usually found at the base of a device, it can be a tricky proposition. Upgrade your lifestyleDigital Trends helps readers keep tabs on the fast-paced world of tech with all the latest news, fun product reviews, insightful editorials, and one-of-a-kind sneak peeks.