The Moon is a floating smart home cam with a built-in hub

If you think smart home tech is creepy, the Moon will be a great device to prove your point. It’s a floating eyeball-shaped security cam that can rotate to follow your movements. If you think smart home tech is exciting and inventive, well, the Moon might help you prove that point as well.

According to its description, the Moon is a levitating smart home camera that doubles as a smart home hub from Delaware-based startup 1-Ring. Because the base charges the cam wirelessly while it floats, it can supposedly levitate in perpetuity. From the app, you can rotate the cam to look around the room. It also has motion sensing and microphones on either side of the lens, so it knows what direction a sound is coming from, and can turn silently (since it floats) to track the noise.

The company’s Indiegogo campaign (currently more than 200 percent funded) says you can customize what the camera does when it senses something — you can receive a notification, record a video clip or snap a photo. The Moon stores footage locally on a microSD card or uploads it to your cloud drive of choice — whether that’s your personal Dropbox account, Google Drive or your own FTP server.

A smart home orbiting the Moon

While the Moon sounds cool as a security camera — yes, the floating aspect is neat, and I particularly like that you can save footage on your cloud service of choice — it checks a lot of other boxes as a multipurpose smart tool. It’ll work as a hub with built-in Wi-Fi (as you’d expect) as well as Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, NFC and even an IR blaster.

The Moon will launch with a few impressive smart home partners, including Philips Hue, SmartThings and Honeywell. In theory, you’ll be able to connect smaller smart home gadgets such as your light bulbs and switches to the Moon, and then control them with the Moon app. 

1-Ring hasn’t specified which SmartThings and Philips Hue devices its product works with, or what types of devices it’s compatible with. A company representative confirmed that you’ll be able to use the Moon in place of a SmartThings or Philips hub, but they’re still working to make sure you have the full functionality of both platforms in time for launch. 

The Moon will also work with all three major voice assistants — Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. Plus, the IR blaster will supposedly let the Moon control your TV and speakers as well.

Lots of other features

1-Ring says it also put temp, humidity and carbon dioxide sensors in the Moon, and you can customize notifications based on those readings. It has a built-in speaker, so you can use it for video calls. Plus, the microphones built into the cam will supposedly recognize the difference between talking, crying and glass breaking. The cam’s specs also look impressive:

• 1080p HD resolution
• It films at 30 frames per second
• The lens has a 130-degree viewing angle
• It has an infrared LED for night vision
• The spherical cam is magnetic, so you can take it off its floating base and stick it to another surface
• The cam’s battery will supposedly last up to five hours away from the base.
• The Moon can create time-lapse footage from your day
• Its away mode cycles connected lights on and off to make it look like you’re home

Outlook

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As always, please note that CNET’s reporting on crowdfunding campaigns is not an endorsement of the project or its creators. Before contributing to any campaign, read the crowdfunding site’s policies — in this case, Indiegogo — to find out your rights (and its refund policies, or the lack thereof) before and after a campaign ends.

Assuming the Moon comes to fruition, it has a nice combination of features to keep up with our favorite smart home cams. You can preorder the floating cam now via the company’s Indiegogo campaign. There’s a discount for preordering, and 1-Ring says it will ship the cam anywhere in the world. At retail, the Moon costs $330 — an expensive price for a smart home cam, but a reasonable one for a celestial body. That price converts to roughly £250 and AU$430. 

Editor’s Note: Updated November 7th with company confirmation on the Moon’s current smart home abilities.