Home Networking

by Jim Mikles
Winter 2002/Spring 2003

You roll out of bed Sunday morning at 10 a.m. sharp and shuffle over to the couch. Settling into your robe and slippers, you command, "I want coffee brewing, the NFC football game on TV and no interruptions from the kids."

What happens next? Unless it's your birthday, you're probably headed for trouble with your spouse. But the folks at the consumer electronics division of the Royal Philips Electronics Co. have you covered. They're conducting studies at the new Philips HomeLab, a unique research facility on Philips' High Tech campus, the center of Philips' global R&D activities, in Eindhoven, Netherlands. In the not-too-distant future, your dream scenario could become reality.

The HomeLab mimics the appearance of a regular home, including fully furnished rooms, a stocked kitchen and, of course, a wide assortment of comfortable couches and chairs. Introduced in April 2002, the HomeLab plans to test and speed to market innovative new technology and act as a proving ground for a consumer electronics concept Philips calls "Ambient Intelligence."

The HomeLab will host residents from a few hours to a couple of months and within its confines, under the discreet, watchful eyes and ears of Philips engineers and research scientists, a new frontier of digital home technology is being born.

The purpose of the R&D lab, according to Gerard Kleisterlee, Philips president and chief executive officer, is to get a very accurate indication of how people interact with these new technologies in their homes over a long term, after the newness of the technology has worn off. Only then, can the researchers get a true sense of use patterns and refine the products for the widest market appeal as well as the greatest consumer utility.

"It will enable us to observe people experiencing technology and new products in the context of a normal house," Kleisterlee said. "As a research facility, HomeLab will provide us with a wealth of new information about the needs of consumers."

Everything from voice-activated home theater systems and appliances, to multimedia-enabled bathroom mirrors are under development at the lab. The underlying theme is to create consumer technology that interacts nearly seamlessly with consumers, whether by wearing it, talking to it, touching it or by just ignoring it and letting it watch and learn from you.

"Philips has a vision. We believe that, in the year 2020, people will relate to electronics in more natural and comfortable ways than we do now," according to a statement issued by the company. "We believe that current inventions by Philips and others will make electronics 'smart.' Technological breakthroughs will also allow us to integrate smart electronics into more friendly environments. Our vision of Ambient Intelligence is one of people living easily in digital environments in which the electronics are sensitive to people's needs, personalized to their requirements, anticipatory of their behavior and responsive to their presence."

Lose the Cords
In this vein, noticeably missing from Philips HomeLab is lots of bulky electronic equipment. In the 2020 home, Philips envisions electronics seamlessly integrated into your home with built-in flat-screen monitors, wireless connections and voice or gesture recognition, so that you will hardly notice its presence. In fact, Philips believes the home of the future will actually look more like the home of the past – when TVs, DVD players, speakers, computers, remote controls and wires didn't add clutter to the living room.

This is a central tenet of the Ambient Intelligence philosophy, whereby technology can "think" on its own by reacting to and even predicting individual needs so the technology requires nearly no effort to use.

For example, in the not-so-distant-future, you really won't have to move a muscle or even press a button to hear the music you want to play. You'll just sit back, say, "Where's the Music?" and hum the tune of what you want to hear. Your Ambiently Intelligent home will put on the song you are thinking of.

"The research conducted at Philips HomeLab will lay the foundation for adapting and training technology to better meet human needs," explains Rodney Brooks, who is the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "What's unique about HomeLab is that it's more than a model home of the future – it's a living facility in which the technologies are real and only a few years away from entering the market."

Beta-Future
According to Philips Electronics, HomeLab is currently testing a number of technologies, including:

Easy Access: Easy Access is a technology that anticipates resident needs, as in the music-by-voice recognition. Easy Access understands the environment (e.g., the lighting or number of people in a room) and can adjust it to specific situations.

WWICE: An interactive user interface called Window to the World of Information, Communication and Entertainment, WWICE will consolidate all home devices into a single system for managing typical digital activities such as recording a voicemail, watching a video or listening to music from any room in the home.

PHENOM: PHENOM (Perceive Home Environments) is a technology that allows residents to view their favorite photo memories from anywhere in the home. Wireless connections and voice recognition will enable residents to pull up photos from their couch or kitchen table.

Nebula: Nebula is an interactive projection system designed to enrich the experience of going to bed, sleeping and waking up. It provides an intuitive and natural way of physically participating in a virtual experience by projecting images, words and other multimedia of the users' choosing in a thematic but random fashion.

Pogo: An interactive game for children, Pogo will help them stretch their imagination by merging fantasy and reality into an environment where they can play and act out stories together.

Intelligent Personal-Care Environment: The Intelligent Personal-Care Environment is a mirror display in the bathroom that can play all sorts of media – anything from cartoons that will help to encourage children to brush their teeth, to the morning news, sports and weather information for adults.