A bath and a cigar at the right time.

A bath and a cigar at the right time.

Magic tablecloths appear in folklore, and in the literature of the 19th century, the first futuristic fantasies appeared about mechanical servants and about the house of the future, which serves its residents (Russian readers will recall the fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna from Chernyshevsky).

a butler without feedback. He cooks eggs and toast, fills the bath and lights a cigar, but at the same time does not react in any way to the absence of the owners who died in a nuclear explosion.

In the finale, the house destroys itself in a fire caused by a bottle of household chemicals broken by the wind, although the fire is hardly a situation that the house designer could not have foreseen.

However, the classic of American literature did not answer the more obvious question: where would the last house to survive Armageddon get a hundred usable eggs?

Exotica for Little Need

Creating a smart home requires three components: drives and sensors, controllers and a control center. All of this can be created without much effort with the modern level of technology.

Specialized exhibitions are filled with wired and wireless devices designed to provide any conceivable smart home function. And recently, these are most often wireless devices, since as the number of sensors grows, the number of control wires and ports on the controller will also grow, and the amount of information transmitted from the sensor to the controller is very small — as a rule, eight bits can express anything — from a command code to the current temperature. In particular, a number of wireless standards, such as ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4), which is a kind of open-source Bluetooth, have found the widest application in the automation of home management.

The capabilities of technology are ahead of human aspirations: for a smart home to really help you live, it does not even need intelligence, but a different place in our lives.

RFID tags. But the creators of these systems have still not managed to solve two critical problems: firstly, someone has to put the products in the smart refrigerator, and secondly, the codes and tags are built into the packaging, not the product. The refrigerator cannot distinguish an empty milk carton from a full one, and even less a spoiled product from a fresh one.

A stand instead of a computer

An Ethernet router that ensures the functioning of all wired and wireless networks in the house, their protection from hacker and virus intrusions from the outside, and also serves as a telephone exchange for regular and Internet telephony and a TV tuner. The Internet, radio, television, and telephone communications all enter the house via one digital channel (with the exception of traditional wired telephony and cellular telephony, which will remain in their usual form for the foreseeable future). This channel ends at the router, which further distributes the signals to their destinations — some via wires, some via a wireless channel, some voice, some video, some data. In technology jargon, this approach is called a «triple play.» The telephone cable, if it is not used to transmit the Internet, as in DSL technology, will also end at the router, which will also connect telephones to itself. Phones will most likely become universal, that is, both IP phones and regular phones, depending on what kind of call — an expensive long-distance or a cheap local one — is being made. However, if local communication rates start changing as they have this year, they may well become extinct like dinosaurs, and voice communication will go to cellular and IP networks.

DVD drive, USB ports, memory card readers. The media server does not need a monitor, nor does it need a mouse or keyboard — it is controlled remotely, via the network. The maximum it will be equipped with is a small information screen right on the case.

Flash memory drives (SSD), which are essentially huge «flash drives» with the same connector as hard drives. They work much faster than hard drives, do not heat up, do not eat up electricity and almost never break — they have no moving parts. Now they are several times more expensive than regular disks, and their maximum size is 64 gigabytes, but if the decline in prices for flash memory and the growth of its capacity do not lose momentum, after a while hard drives will follow in the same direction as three-inch floppy disks. This means that NAS will turn from boxes with batteries of hard drives, as they are today, into boards with many connectors, where the owner of a smart home will stick a new circuit with a new terabyte of memory as needed.

Three in one

In an online store — like iPod owners now buy music in the iTunes service. You go to the program-catalog, choose, and the media server itself will pay for it (putting it in the general bill for the next month), and download it, and record it where necessary. Judging by the fact that one of the largest labels EMI recently refused protection for most of the songs it sells, it has finally begun to dawn on the owners of entertainment rights that the convenience of circulation will allow them to get back what they lose on piracy. It is funny in the era of universal digital players to sell compact discs and fight the creation of media files.

«Formula 1» instead of football, a program about animals instead of a reality show, cartoons on demand at one time or from a file library — here is the evening program ready. Manipulating the tastes and needs of the audience in such a system can be forgotten — those who do not like flat variety humor will simply never see it, and haters of official news will be able to watch news stories from alternative sources. The digital home will greatly undermine the capabilities of traditional television companies, while simultaneously creating huge opportunities for individual producers to reach viewers with their films and shows directly, as has already happened with individual authors thanks to blogs.

The DVD player, VCR and music center will disappear altogether, leaving behind only a speaker system. The speakers may even become completely wireless, receiving sound via high-speed communication channels such as Wi-Fi. Many remote controls will also disappear, replaced by a single universal remote control without buttons with a touch screen — it will have so many functions that no buttons will be enough. There will also be no need to point it towards the TV or player, since the infrared sensor will replace the wireless interface directly through the network to the same media server.

It is not for nothing that laptops threaten to completely displace huge desktop and floor-standing system units in a few years — they can already do almost everything.

Not just for business

TV — a TV adapter that can buy videos on the iTunes website without a computer, download them to the built-in hard drive and show them on a large screen. Considering that Apple is the last to enter the retail consumer market, it is worth thinking that soon new houses will be built initially not only with electrical wiring, but also with twisted pairs for Ethernet.

In fact, living space is starting to move faster and faster in the same direction as office space ten years ago. This is not a new process: cell phones and computers were also once «for business only» items. But just as cell phones and computers, having become family goods, not only changed themselves but also began to create demand for new goods and services, so the situation around the digital home will not be similar to the situation with the digital office. Digital music and video have become the main catalysts for its emergence, but it is unlikely that the digital home will be exhausted by them. Rather, it will begin with them.