I love home automation systems. Receiving status and having control of my entire house – all through a single interface – is something I’ve been dreaming of for a long time. While I have made some progress in this area, I’m still operating the technology in my house with several disconnected control interfaces (lighting, HVAC, and AV systems) – and I do still need to make the occasional visit to the drawer full of remotes to get certain things to work.
There are some control systems available in the marketplace that attempt to provide a ‘whole house’ control experience. However, beyond being expensive to customize and install, they tend to have pretty primitive control interfaces (mostly virtual menus and buttons on a touch screen) and are not very intuitive to operate – even for technically inclined people.
Well the folks from the Media Interaction Lab at the Upper Austria University of Applied Science have come up with a new control interface design called CRISTAL – Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces. It is built around a multitouch table (reminiscent of Microsoft’s Surface computing device) that presents a live room image controllable via multi-touch. This video provides a good overview of how the system operates:
This looks like the type of system I would love to have in my house. Touch based, intuitive, and with one panel controlling everything. Even though this is just a lab based demonstration, all of the technologies it is built on already exist in the consumer marketplace today. I could see something like this going commercial in the next few years if it can get a big enough backer behind it to launch it with the scale it needs to be successful. Both Apple and Microsoft comes to mind as potential providers of this kind of home experience. In fact, if Apple does release a tablet at some point in the near future, I believe providing this kind of control surface will be one of the motivating factors.
This is definitely the kind of experience people are looking for. It’s not about navigating menus and touching buttons. It’s about interacting with intuitive proxies for the environment around them. Without a doubt, the army of traditional remotes most people struggle with today have overstayed their welcome.
And no one I know would be sorry to see them go.