Then Again, If You Don't Ask, You Don't Receive

By Karen E. Peterson

HomeLab is outfitted with the tools that Philips hopes will lay the foundation for its vision of ultra-modern living, key among them a bank of monitors keeping a close, developmental eye on the task at hand: turning cold computing into a warm and fuzzy technology.

Monitors, both digital and human, keep tabs on HomeLab volunteers. Photo from Royal Philips.

Warm and fuzzy technology? If that sounds like an oxymoron, Philips begs to differ. Its point of view, shared by HomeLab pervasive-computing collaborators such as MIT's Oxygen Project, is to get on with the show – in this case by demonstrating what the technology is capable of doing. With pervasive computing already a reality, Philips wants to raise the electronic roof beams by creating systems that are truly task- and service-oriented.

"Technology in our homes will evolve to the point that it we don't have to 'work' to experience it," assures HomeLab's creator, Dr. Emile Aarts. "Rather, it will understand us and react to our needs, making our lives easier."

The first task is to find out what people want and meld that with what Philips sees as the latest paradigm shift – exchanging our current static "operating system" environment to one based on the "interactive experience."

And the way to get started, says Philips, is to study "the physical, social and cultural context in which technology will be used and its implications on daily life." The context here is the domicile.

People and Machines Realizing a 'Shared and Tangible Vision'

By design, HomeLab is set up to allow researchers and designers to work in concert with the end-users "to realize a shared and tangible vision" of future in-home electronic systems.

As MIT's Rodney Brooks said of the HomeLab project, "Only through living with our technologies can we discover which ones really improve our lives and which ones only sound good as proposals."

At this stage, observation is a key element, hence the bank of monitors. HomeLab's audio- and video-based control system both collects and analyzes the data the volunteers provide: the full range of human activity, including postures, facial expressions and social interactions.

A case in point, as described by Philips and experienced by two of the first HomeLab volunteers.

The couple was looking forward to a vacation, so after dinner they began to browse through holiday brochures and talk about destinations. As they did, they began to sense that the room was "listening" to their vacation musings.

Actually, it was more than a sensation: Pictures and movie clips began to appear on the flat screens hanging on the HomeLab walls – images that matched the actual destinations they had been discussing.

In fact, the ambience of room itself changed: the lighting began to take on the hues of the Tuscan landscapes pictured in the brochures.