Smart Home--Get Anything You Need with a Wave of the Hand.

Hand gesture control of your Smart Home. Image credit to
MIT Media Lab

In my last update I talked about how everything from goods to services is racking up innovative functionalities to earn the credibility of attaching the buzzword 'smart' to its name.

The concept of smart home has been around for some time now; but it has mainly focused on small-scale stuffs in the home like heaters with sensors; doors with smart security system; electronic monitoring of your house energy consumption; the use of green energy alternatives in cooking; and so on. But now the concept has been taken very farther up the ladder to involve the house itself that houses the home, being inspired by problems like scarcity of land in the urban areas, portability, mobility and environmental pollution. At the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, architects, civil engineers, city planners and other scientists are living their imagination of the future of housing.The MIT Media Lab arm of the School of Architecture and Planning has designed prototypes of what I will call super smart homes. One of the most interesting of these projects is the CityHome project.

The CityHome RoboWall Module. Image credit to
MIT Media Lab

Hand-gestured bedroom for some rest. MIT Media Lab

The CityHome project depends on a smart modular technology known as the RoboWall to provide the smart home experience. In simple terms, you rent a small room about 18 square metres and fit it with your customized RoboWall module--which is a transformable wall system that incorporates furniture, entertainment systems, kitchen setup, office equipment, library, storage, a home gym, home lighting, toilet and bathroom, and any other stuff that is found in a home--and then get whatever you want with a gesture of your hand: if you want to entertain guests you make the gesture and RoboWall transforms into the perfect sitting room for your guests; this sitting room can later be instructed by voice to reconfigure to a kitchen for cooking which can then be motioned to transform to a gym for a workout session, a bedroom for rest, an office suite or library for some serious business, and when you want to send some brown dudes down the pipe you gesture out the rest room . The RoboWall also enables two  purpose-serving sections like the kitchen opening into the living space if you want to shuttle between the two when you are busy with some chores and cooking at the same time (an analogue of multitasking which I call MULTICHORING); or the kitchen can be gestured to close off if you just needed to grab a pack of cookies and a bowl of ice cream from the fridge once and focus on an interesting TV program. This smart functionality of gesture-controlled home reconfiguration and movement makes it possible to live a 74-square metre apartment experience in an 18-square metre space with the RoboWall.

CityHome enables you to do MULTICHORING,
including sending brown dudes down the pipe.

Some serious business.

The CityHome project is still in the stage of prototype, making it a futuristic solution for the already emerging problems in mega cities around the world such as scarcity of building space; overcrowding; climate change from carbon emission due, in part, to high energy consumption in our homes whose waste is not recycled; and so on. But even when its need becomes utmost in the future, it will likely, initially, be very expensive for the average income earner hoping to get an apartment of his or hers. However, with time, I think it will come to stay like smartphones just that there may be something like HIGH-END SMART HOME AND LOW-END SMART HOME MODULES; hence, the majority gets to own a smart home modular apartment, but with some having less functionality than the others.

The MIT media Lab. Image credit to MIT media Lab