HSITP Smart Mirrors for Innovation Talent Living

The Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park — HSITP — is one of the largest innovation projects in the region: a site of 87.7 hectares, developed in two phases at the Lok Ma Chau Loop. Its first phase alone provides around one million square meters of floor area. And in every talent apartment in the park, residents will find a smart mirror supplied by Oolaa.

The park is being built to attract and keep research talent — people choosing between innovation hubs across Asia. For residents like these, the apartment is not a dormitory; it is part of the offer. HSITP's planners understood that, and the smart mirror in each talent apartment is one of the details that makes the offer concrete.

The park in brief

Phase one of HSITP brings together an unusually complete mix of facilities: wet laboratories and advanced manufacturing R&D buildings, dry laboratories and offices, industry-academia-research collaboration space, talent apartments, visitor accommodation, and commercial and supporting facilities. Beyond the first batch of buildings, the remaining phase-one land is being developed through investment promotion, using market forces to add speed and scale while building high-quality research and industrial facilities.

It is, in other words, a small city designed around innovation — research space, production space, and living space planned together rather than left to chance. The talent apartments sit inside that plan, housing the specialists the laboratories and offices exist to attract.

Smart mirrors in every talent apartment

Each talent apartment provides a smart mirror, giving specialists an excellent living environment. From the mirror, residents can control their smart home and keep up with real-time information — the home becomes more comfortable, and the fun of a smart home becomes part of ordinary life rather than a showroom trick.

The choice is a natural fit for the audience. Researchers and engineers evaluate technology for a living; a token gesture would fool no one. A mirror that genuinely works as the apartment's information and control point — checking information at the start of the day, running the home's devices from one place — matches how this generation of professionals already expects a home to behave. It also sets the tone before a single experiment runs: you have moved to a place that takes technology seriously, including in the bathroom.

For Oolaa, the project extends a familiar pattern. The company's smart mirrors serve residences and hotels across Hong Kong and Macau — 31,000+ installations to date — and its smart home implementation works across the major platforms, with voice control through Google Assistant, including Cantonese support. At HSITP, that experience is applied at campus scale: one reliable mirror standard, repeated across the talent apartments of an entire innovation park.

Scale brings its own discipline. A mirror that delights in a show flat must still delight in the five-hundredth apartment, installed the same way, working the same way, supported the same way. That is where a factory-direct manufacturer earns its keep: the same company that designs the mirror makes it, ships it, and stands behind every unit — one standard of quality from the production line to the resident's first morning in a new city.

Why the apartment is part of the competition

Innovation parks compete for people before they compete for companies. A specialist weighing offers from several cities compares laboratories, yes — but also the commute, the community, and the apartment waiting at the end of the day. Parks that house their talent well keep their talent longer, and the details of that housing carry a message about how the park itself is run. A smart mirror in every apartment is a small line item in an 87.7-hectare project, but it is one residents interact with daily — each morning's information, each evening's home controls, delivered from the room where the day begins.

There is a coherence to it, too. A park built to develop the technologies of the future would undermine its own story if its homes felt a decade behind. Living among working smart-home technology — using it, not touring it — gives residents a daily, domestic proof of the park's premise, and gives visiting collaborators and guests the same impression without a word of explanation.