Smart houses…do you control the technology or the technology you?!
Inside Microsoft’s house of the future
Smart Home Control
Microsoft’s Smart House
Microsoft Research presents “HomeOS.”
It’s actually a vision that Bill Gates has had for over a decade. This 2002 PC World article points to a Gatesian concept of “a home full of smart gadgets.” Most of the prototypes Gates touted back then actually seem almost comically irrelevant, given the smartphone in your pocket right now, including an alarm clock that “uses a wireless Internet connection to automatically update the time” and refrigerator magnets whose LCDs offer “real-time data feeds, such as time, weather, sport scores, road conditions, and other useful information.” I can tape my iPhone to my fridge and do a lot better than that.
HomeOS isn’t a secret. Miscrosoft’s research geeks periodically pipe up to report on the progress of their vision. Here’s a video from last year, in which one of the researchers says, “The underlying observation in our work is that a lot of us now have a dozen or so networked devices in home…so what that means is that we have all the basic ingredients for building smarter homes already.” He adds: “The way these devices work today, and the way they’re controlled, it requires a lot of effort on the part of a tech enthusiast to get them going together to manage their homes.”
But the idea behind HomeOS–were it to ever migrate from the research division to the actual products division within Microsoft–is to make the smart home a reality for the masses. The key here would be to create a HomeOS that is device agnostic, allowing easy integration of your Nest thermostat, your iPhone, your webOS-powered refrigerator, and so on. (Being generous with competitors doesn’t mean Redmond couldn’t make money off of the thing, naturally–another white paper points out that HomeOS would need an app store of its own.) Microsoft is reportedly testing out HomeOS in about a dozen homes already.
Of course, inevitably, where the technologists go, the science fiction writers have already been. Ray Bradbury once wrote a story about a smart home called “The Veldt” (it ends poorly for the family involved; you can listen to Stephen Colbert, of all people, read that story here). Disney adapted and sanitized “The Veldt,” making it into a cheesy TV movie called “Smart House” in 1999. Let’s hope HomeOS can throw a party as totally radical as the one shown here!
CES 2013 Samsung Smart Home
Listen to how this woman is talking to the people in front of her…like she is talking to a bunch of toddlers in kindergarten!