Let your home do the thinking

This Issue This is a part of the Behind the walls feature

By - , Build 136

The maze of wiring behind the walls will be a thing of the past as home automation technology redefines how houses operate. Soon, a single high-speed cable will manage a myriad of communications.

TECHNOLOGY HAS GREATLY improved the ease and comfort of our lives. In this post-PC world, we have computers in our pockets and information at our fingertips. We’re liking, plussing, pinning and poking at every possible opportunity.

Even our buildings are becoming smarter and more connected, as home automation pushes technology into every available nook and cranny, making us rethink what a home can do.

Done right, it can do extraordinary things. It can detect and react to nuances in mood and environment in a way that seems almost intuitive.

It can subtly manage a home’s security, lighting, heating, ventilation, water and entertainment systems to such a degree that they seem to disappear behind the walls, providing the occupants with carefree convenience.

No worries

Brendon Reid, Director of Auckland-based Automation Associates, says that this is the essence of home automation.

‘The goal is to enhance and simplify life for the building’s occupants, never to complicate it or be intrusive,’ he says.

‘A good example is when you go on vacation. First, the home automation system turns off the lights and engages the security system when you walk out the door. When you don’t come back for a couple of days, it also turns off your underfloor heating and your heated towel rails, and if you’re still away after a week, it shuts down your hot water. All without a single human input,’ he says.

A relatively new field using heuristics goes one step further and tries to anticipate what the building’s occupant will want.

‘If you usually go into the kitchen and listen to George FM on a weekday morning, the system will learn your habits and have that set-up ready and waiting for you. Instead of having to press a button and tune the right station, the building appears to be thinking ahead and predicting what you want,’ says Brendon.

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Touchy-feely

These systems will often adapt the human-machine interface, usually on a touch screen phone or tablet, to prioritise the actions the occupant is most likely to want to take and make them more immediately available.

‘That keeps the interface simple to use, but it also means the user doesn’t have to work through menus and push five buttons just to turn the lights off,’ says Brendon.

The rise of smartphones, tablets and other touch technologies means that every occupant of the home can have their own interface and use them simultaneously, rather than sharing a single proprietary device screwed to the kitchen wall.

‘Dad might be in the kitchen using an iPad docked on the bench to turn the lights down for dinner, while mum is in the lounge using her Samsung Galaxy to control the home theatre system and their daughter is out on the deck controlling the water feature and spa pool using her iPhone.’

Although manufacturers of top-end home automation products often provide proprietary apps to control their gear, Brendon Reid says that a good home automation company will wrap all these functions into a single interface that is aware of the building’s full range of abilities. A good interface may always abstract those functions so the occupant can communicate with the building around their goals, rather than its capabilities.

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Function versus capability

Stephan Goodhue, Director of Liquid Automation, an Auckland-based marine and residential automation company, employs several programmers to work on this kind of integration.

‘Take lighting control,’ he says. ‘In an open-plan living, dining and kitchen space, you might have eight or nine lighting circuits. Instead of using independent controls for each one, you could use a single lighting control for the entire space that offers dining, entertainment and cooking modes.

‘The occupant selects the pre-programmed scene, and the system automatically establishes the appropriate lighting levels for that activity across all the circuits at once, rather than having to adjust the lights in each area. You might then add heating, ventilation, artwork, audio and visual display options to complete the scene.’

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Coming to a room near you

As sophisticated as these systems are, home automation technology is changing rapidly, and the industry is on the verge of profound change.

‘Everything is going towards streaming content,’ says Stephan. ‘No one will own a satellite decoder, DVD or Blu-ray player – everything you watch and listen to will come via the internet on a single high-speed network cable. Gone are the days of lots of little boxes plugged in around the house.’

This is an emerging trend in gaming as well. Instead of relying on a console, such as a PlayStation or Xbox, game content will be streamed directly to and from any convenient panel display in the home via a high-speed internet connection. All the graphical processing and heavy lifting normally handled by the console will be offloaded to a remote server.

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Talk to your home

With the arrival of Siri and other voice-recognition technologies, homeowners and occupants may dispense with touch screens in favour of talking to their home. The ability to say ‘House: dining mode, two guests tonight’ while preparing dinner has an appeal that even the most sophisticated smartphone app would be hard pressed to match.

There are revolutions in physical technologies coming too. Thin, flexible and extremely high-resolution displays have already been demonstrated in the lab and are not far from commercialisation. This type of technology is set to fundamentally transform the home, as any solid surface becomes a potential display.

‘Transparent, high-res touch screen displays may replace traditional windows in our homes,’ says Stephan Goodhue.

‘The window would display content in much the same way televisions do today. Then, when you’re finished, it could be made to look and act like a venetian blind, complete with adjustable virtual pull-cords on the touch screen, or display a scene to suit your mood.

‘Or, if it’s raining today, you could even play back yesterday’s sunshine.’

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