I found some property on the shore of Lake Washington within easy commuting distance of Microsoft. Living space will be about average for a large house. The family living room will be about fourteen by twenty-eight feet, including an area for watching television or listening to music. And there will be cozy spaces for one or two people, although there will also be a reception hall to entertain one hundred comfortably for dinner.
First thing, as you come in, you’ll be presented with an electronic pin to clip to your clothes. This pin will tell the house who and where you are, and the house will use this information to try to meet and even anticipate your needs–all as unobtrusively as possible. Someday, instead of needing the pin, it might be possible to have a camera system with visual-recognition capabilities, but that’s beyond current technology. When it’s dark outside, the pin will cause a moving zone of light to accompany you through the house. Unoccupied rooms will be unlit. As you walk down a hallway, you might not notice the lights ahead of you gradually coming up to full brightness and the lights behind you fading. Music will move with you, too. It will seem to be everywhere, although, in fact, other people in the house will be hearing entirely different music or nothing at all. A movie or the news or a phone call will be able to follow you around the house, too. If you get a phone call, only the handset nearest you will ring.
You won’t be confronted by the technology, but it will be readily and easily available. Hand-held remote controls and discreetly visible consoles in each room will put you in charge of your immediate environment and of the house’s entertainment system. You’ll use the controls to tell the monitors in a room to become visible and what to display. You’ll he able to choose from among thousands of pictures, recordings, movies, and television programs, and you’ll have all sorts of options available for selecting information.
If you’re planning to visit Hong Kong soon, you might ask the screen in your room to show you pictures of the city. It will seem to you as if the photographs are displayed everywhere, although actually the images will materialize on the walls of rooms just before you walk in and vanish after you leave. If you and I are enjoying different things and one of us walks into a room where the other is siring, the house might continue the audio and visual imagery for the person who was in the room first, or it might change to programming both of us like.
I will be the first home user for one of the most unusual electronic features in my house. The product is a database of more than a million still images, including photographs and reproductions of paintings. If you’re a guest, you’ll be able to call up portraits of presidents, pictures of sunsets, airplanes, skiing in the Andes, a rare French stamp, the Beatles in 1965, or reproductions of High Renaissance paintings, on screens throughout the house.
I believe quality images will be in great demand on the information highway. This vision that the public will find image-browsing worthwhile is obviously totally unproven. I think the right interface will make it appealing to a lot of people.
A decade from now, access to the millions of images and all the other entertainment opportunities I’ve described will be available in man), homes and will certainly be more impressive than those I’ll have when I move into my house in late 1996. My house will just be getting some of the services a little sooner.
One of the many fears expressed about the information highway is that it will reduce the time people spend socializing. Some worry that homes will become such cozy entertainment providers that we’ll never leave them, and that, safe in our private sanctuaries, we’ll become isolated. I don’t think that’s going to happen. As behaviorists keep reminding us, we’re social animals. We will have the option of staying home more because the highway will create so many new options for home-based entertainment, for communications-both personal and professional-and for employment. Although the mix of activities will change, I think people will decide to spend almost as much time out of their homes.
The highway will not only make it easier to keep up with distant friends, it will also enable us to find new companions. Friendships formed across the network will lead naturally to getting together in person. This alone will make life more interesting. Suppose .you want to reach someone to play bridge with. The information highway will let you find card players with the right skill level and availability in your neighborhood, or in other cities or nations.
I enjoy experimenting, and I know some of my concepts for the house will work out better than others. Maybe I’ll decide to conceal the monitors behind conventional wall art or throw the electronic pins into the trash. Or maybe I’ll grow accustomed to the systems in the house, or even fond of them, and wonder how I got along without them. That’s my hope.
Wood is $00-year-old recycled Douglas fir from a nearby lumber mill.
100 Microcomputers and the software that controls them are built into the home, letting residents experience new technologies without having to pay attention to the complex operations behind them.
Residents and visitors wear a special pin that identifies them to the house, which then adapts itself to their tastes. It also allows the house to track a resident’s location.
The temperature in each room changes to suit the occupant’s preference. To save energy, the temperature decreases at night.
The home displays each occupant’s favorite images on the closest wall via high-resolution monitor.
Films and television shows can move with each resident to different rooms.
Residents program their pins with their musical preferences. Then, as they move through the home, their favorite songs play on the nearest information appliance, even as people in different rooms listen to their own favorite music.
Lights in one room will gradually come on when someone walks in, while those in the room left behind turn off.
The house also has features that probably won’t be too common in the future: an L-shaped swimming pool with underwater music, a 20-vehicle garage, a $2-screen video wall and room for 100 at dinner.
