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Making High-Tech Work for You

Any architect, builder or scientist can speculate about what the house of the future might be like. But Grace can tell you.

Grace is a talking house. Her high-tech gadgets and innovative uses of everyday objects, along with advances in design and construction, will change the way we think about our homes -- and live in them. Grace isn't the only one exploring how technology can make our homes more efficient, safe, comfortable and fun. Here, a sampling of home innovators' best ideas.

Grace is not a real house. More formally known as the Microsoft Home, she exists inside an office building on the company's campus in Redmond, Washington. But once inside, it's easy to imagine you're in a trendy, futuristic home.

Picture this: You enter the house, and Grace's voice, coming from hidden speakers, relays your messages. In the kitchen, you set a bag of flour on the sleekly engineered stone counter. Grace sees what you're doing, and projects a list of flour-based recipes on the counter. Once you choose one, Grace recites a list of ingredients. She even knows what's in the pantry, thanks to RFID technology (the kind of system that lets you go through a toll plaza without stopping).

There's also a bulletin board in the kitchen made of "intelligent fabric" that functions like a touch-screen computer. You can tack up postcards or invitations and surf the Web with the touch of a finger. The invitation could be RFID-encoded, so tacking it up opens an online RSVP window. It's part of Microsoft's Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT), which seeks to make everyday objects more efficient.

The day when your house will be like a family member is not that far off, says Pam Heath, a manager in Consumer Strategy and Prototyping at Microsoft. This notion of seamless computing, in which technology is everywhere yet nowhere (except when we want it), underlies most future-home thinking. At the Andersen window company in Minnesota, advanced technology manager Jay Libby envisions windows made of smart glass that can be transformed into a TV.

"Nobody wants a television set," says Libby. "You want the service it provides." If he gets his way, the TV will disappear into the view, and the term picture window will be redefined.

Home entertainment is just one consideration for the future. At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, scientists are designing systems that will allow older people to continue living independently. So Grandma's home can be intelligently wired to recognize her patterns of wake, sleep and movement; family members would be notified of any changes via computer.

Does spying on Grandma sound creepy? Director Beth Mynatt says that "a good bit of our research has been working on how to convey information without sacrificing privacy and autonomy. We also don't want to create inappropriate anxiety. Maybe she just took a quiet day to read, and the system would have to recognize that."

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Rodents had overrun a posh private school near New York City. So the headmaster, a friend of mine, asked a health inspector to deliver a slide presentation to teachers and students, showing how to remedy the situation, i.e., stow trash, no food in class, etc.

The following day, a teacher had her very young children write a letter to the inspector, thanking him for the visit. One of the students wrote, "Dear Mr. Johnson, Thank you for coming to my school. Until I saw you, I didn't know what a rat looked like."

-- Ronny Lee

“ All generalizations are dangerous, even this one. ”

— Alexandre Dumas

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