Home of the future still evolving at Microsoft

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 15 July 2010 16:41

Your IT - Home IT

The latest remodelling of Microsoft's home of the future gives some insight to the way some of us may be living in the second half of this decade.

The Microsoft Home is a demonstration facility set up under the leadership of Craig Mundie (now Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer) in 1994 to present scenarios and demonstrations of the potential uses of IT in a domestic context.

Products that have originated at, or been influenced by the Home include Microsoft's Tablet PC and Windows Media Center. The company also believes that the world's first digital photo frame was created 12 years ago for the Home.

Housed in the Executive Briefing Center on Microsoft's Redmond campus, it has been regularly updated over the years and currently reflects the merging of the digital and physical worlds, the way sensors are shrinking in size and cost, and the way information can be assembled from multiple sources.

Demonstrations in the Home straddle what is currently possible and what is a few years away from a cost, adoption or technology perspective. For example, ringing the doorbell triggers a camera to take a photo of the caller, which is automatically sent to the supposed resident's mobile phone. That's easy enough to do in real life.

But things like room lighting that adjusts to suit the piece of media that's currently being played, a kitchen bench that can identify the different medications among mixture of tablets, or a multi-panel digital photo frame that can identify items (eg souvenirs) placed on a shelf and the display related photos aren't things we're all likely to have by Christmas.

Like a good butler, a good home shouldn't be intrusive - see page 2.