Smart cameras could be about to get a major upgrade with Matter 1.5

Are smart home ecosystems at an inflection point right now? This year has already been a frustrating one for Google Home users, and as if those regular usage headaches weren’t bad enough, companies like Google and Amazon have been complicating their smart home offerings with AI-powered subscriptions — and sometimes introducing new, unwanted content in the process. That’s pushing more and more people to consider a more DIY smart home solution, and today we’ve got great news for anybody going that route.

When our own Calvin Wankhede shared that DIY story earlier this year, he had built his smart home around Home Assistant software, and was relying on a mix of Wi-Fi and Zigbee for connectivity. Zigbee’s not your only option there, and we’ve also got the Matter standard running on the Thread protocol. When discussing his choices, Calvin mentioned that he went with Zigbee because Matter still felt a bit “barebones.” Well, that’s rapidly changing, and right now the Connectivity Standards Alliance is sharing the big upgrades arriving with Matter 1.5

Easily the most impactful there is support for cameras. Cameras aren’t just incredibly useful tools for keeping on top of what’s going on in your home and helping to secure it, but also represent a particular pain point for smart homes — even long before we had AI subscriptions, cameras were driving that pressure for us to pay monthly fees.

Now, Matter support for cameras is no guarantee that we’re about to get some really great, broadly compatible, affordable-to-use options, but it certainly opens the door for manufacturers to successfully target those needs. What we’re most curious about now is seeing which companies will be in a hurry to announce their Matter camera support — and which might be the hold-outs.

Beyond cameras, Matter 1.5 also beefs up its support for other smart home hardware. You can already use sensors to help automate processes around your home, and this update to the standard adds a new category: soil sensors. Just like you may already be doing for the air in your home, these can measure soil temperature and humidity — data useful for your irrigation planning.

We’re also getting some under-the-hood upgrades to how Matter handles all variety of closures — whether that’s a garage door or some smart blinds, the standard is simplifying how developers build these “closing” interactions. For us, that should mean a more consistent experience across devices.

Matter 1.5 further includes tweaks to its network data handling, energy management, and all these other things we’d only expect an increasingly fleshed-out standard to address. Hopefully we start feeling its impact in the months to come.