Future Shock?

My assignment was to visit the 'Home of the Future' for our CBS News Sunday Morning annual "Design Edition," airing May 18. It was a journey that produced both delight and anxiety.

As you enter a nondescript building at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington, you are met with enough cutting edge technology to make any gadgeteer gleeful. But that's the problem. When a visitor rings the bell, the house's hidden computer -- aka "Grace" -- calls out "someone is at the front door." If you are the person inside the house, the visitor's face pops up on your cell phone. Unfortunately, I can rarely recall where my cell phone is. I can just imagine my 87-year-old mother standing in the snow at my front door as I root through my purse.

Grace-the-Computer does have some lovely attributes. If you live in the home, and ask for your schedule, she will gently remind you..."Conference call later with Charles and Sue." But Grace is a demon in the kitchen. In the future, grocery store products may be packaged with little radio frequency identification tags, which means that every time you come in with groceries, Grace will make an inventory. So if you just take out a bag of flour and put it next to your food processor, Grace will conveniently project right onto the kitchen counter, a list of recipes you can make with the flour and other products available in the house. She will even read the recipe out loud to you. No more telling the family, "Oh, I just can't think of anything to make. Let's go out."

The "Home of the Future" will also have the "Closet of the Future." If you hold a cute top up to a special mirror, you'll get a read-out of when you purchased the top, what the laundering instructions are and, most important, which of your other clothes look good with the top. That will cut down on running out to buy a new pair of pants just because you can't find anything to go with that cute top. Darn!

My favorite feature in the "Home of the Future" is the one that allows you to redecorate any space instantly. Say Grandma will be staying in your 15-year-old's room when she visits. You can command Grace to "put the teen room back to Grandma mode." Suddenly, the special lights that have been projecting a funky design on your child's wall turn everything to a soft yellow. And a video monitor becomes visible on the wall, tuned to a camera that lets Grandma keep an eye on what her pet is doing back home.

The most frightening part of all this technology of course, is who is going to repair it. On the old Jetson cartoon, when Jane's "Fooderaackacycle," which is supposed to let her push a few buttons and produce a meal, goes on the fritz, even she can't get it repaired.

Will Grace come complete with a personal computer technician, kind of like the way we mortals have our own family doctors? I doubt it. I can't even get a plumber to come over and repair my leaky faucet. Perhaps the "Home of the Future," is best when it's just that - something to dream about.

Comments

[totalliberal]

What happens when the whole house seizes up with "Fatal Error" and you can't shut it down? Specially with your heat and oven on full. Then it will be a "fatal error".

[WIpatriot]

Every room color will be BSOD.

[jsarets]

I'm designing a home of the future right now (that's my job). It's a zero-carbon building with a south-facing, 30-degree pitched roof covered in solar panels. The cooling is done by pumping water from an underground tank to drip nozzles along the top edge of the roof, partially evaporating as it runs over the solar panels in a thin sheet. This evaporatively chilled water is circulated to radiant ceiling panels throughout the building.

Heating and domestic hot water is provided by an electric heat pump instead of a natural gas boiler. Strategically-placed windows and automated motorized light shelves provide enough natural sunlight to eliminate the vast majority of electric lighting during daytime. The external walls have an overall thermal resistance of R-30 (typical would be R-11), and the roof is R-45 (versus the typical R-19).

The projected energy usage is about 80% less than a typical building of this size, and the remaining 20% is completely offset by rooftop solar generation. The building also features innovative rainwater collection and wastewater recycling systems to reduce freshwater consumption. Most aspects of the building's operation can be monitored and controlled through a web interface.

[WIpatriot]

I like yours much better.

[cynicalidealist]

At this time of unprecedented energy prices, the aesthetic of such a house seems all the more superficial.

How will we POWER homes of the future?

Should their be an Open Source standard, rather than proprietary technology, as Microsoft will most certainly offer.

Looking forward to the piece.

CI

[zaneblue]

Earthship homes are the homes of the future, built out of trash, built into the ground, and almost completely self-sustaining.

[Pacific231]

For the real deal on what homes of the future should be, Google: green future homes. THAT is the real deal.

[Pacific231]

Years ago I read a hilarious article on such a prototype 'home of the future.' It gets confused easily by rare but possible events, like your refrigerator light burning out, which is not a specific 'event' in the home automation programming, so just to be safe it shuts off the power to your entire kitchen. Or a tree branch bumps your windows during a storm, triggering multiple automated calls to the police for a possible break-in, thus ticking off the cops a little bit!

Even funnier, it raised the possibility of new computer viruses that would wreak havoc on the home, with names like Homewrecker or Poltergeist, causing everything from overflowing toilets to burnt toast :-)

Putting aside some fatalistic posts which I hope will prove misgiven (hopefully Obama becomes President in 2009; then we'll be able to move the Doomsday Clock back significantly), I think these kinds of technically tricked-out homes of the future will be as far off the mark as Disney's Home of the Future from the late 60's that looked like a spaceship loaded with crappy "space age" plastic furniture. :-)

[Rule Of Law]

"The most frightening part of all this technology of course, is who is going to repair it."

To my thinking, the most frightening part of it all would be, how are we going to provide the energy to power all these unnecessary consumer toys? And at what cost to our budget for necessities and to the environment?

[tao53nyc]

Indeed, my biggest concern is that this is "Microsofts" one-best-proprietary-way to build a "smart home" of the future. How much bandwidth (and energy) will it expend just to defend itself against virus and malware attacks? Would you want your entire home to "crash" right in the middle of your dinner party?

Smarthome technology is available right now, in modular pieces you can add as you go, and can be controlled via a web-interface that is independent of what OS you use. The AI system can be added when it matures - and it will probably run on some flavor of Unix.

[JScott]

Sadly most all of these 'Houses Of The Future' are seldom realized or the future catches up with it or some of the things turn out to be darned useless.

[RickO]

If it's the Mocrosoft house of the future, service will definitley be a constant concern. I'll wait for the Mac version (iHouse) to come out. The recipes will be healthier and it will actually screen your visitors for you.

[hopeless277]

Rita,

I have some bad news for you. The home of the future will more likely be a mud hut with a dirt floor. With gas prices expected to be $10 to $15 a gallon, no one(outside of Bill Gates) will be able to afford computers or the electricity that powers them. We will probably be living much like the native Americans. Tribal and traveling on foot. Either that or we won't be living at all.

[Cathexis]

Well, I partially agree.

I think such homes of the future *will* exist.

Unfortunately, they'll be affordable to only 0.1% of the population.

Some of the former Middle Class will have homes with dirt floors.

The rest ...

I wonder if enough things will still come in cardboard boxes?

[Desiderata]

Stiff upper lip, hopeless277. If push comes to shove, we can always eat the rich.