When Smart Houses Turn Smart Aleck

January 13, 2000

When Smart Houses Turn Smart Aleck

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By JULIE V. IOVINE

he Christmas party at the new Manhattan town house of Robert Soros and his wife, Melissa Schiff-Soros, was in full swing. As adults sipped Champagne in the candlelighted parlor, children raced upstairs to experience the electronic high life in its latest flowering: a home theater screening of the Disney classic "Peter Pan."

Cheryl Ungar for The New York Times

Michael Mozer's computerized house in Colorado - with its cameras and sensors that anticipate every move.

The large screen descended from the ceiling with an extraterrestrial hum, but the house lights refused to dim -- despite a horde of caterers stabbing frantically at a panel of small buttons on the wall.
As bright spots flashed and faded overhead, Mr. Soros, an investment manager and philanthropist, bent prayerfully over a control panel, playing its glowing touch-screen like a pipe organ as he tried to raise the volume on Tinkerbell. He had given up when the sound suddenly surged to Imax level. Children screeched.

"I would give anything to go back to good old toggle switches," his wife, a filmmaker, said later, sighing at the memory.
On their own living room wall in upstate New York, John Markus, a screenwriter and television producer, and his wife, Ardith Truhan, an artist, have 14 buttons that control lighting; 22 buttons for the stereo and CD player; and four buttons for the window shades. Another panel operates the DVD, satellite service and laser discs in their home theater system. Six lines accommodate the couple's telephones, fax machines and modems. By phoning the control "brain," Mr. Markus can regulate every device even from the middle of a studio set in Los Angeles.

"Sometimes I'm tempted to raise the bedroom blinds from the city just to scare my wife when she's there alone," Mr. Markus said. "But I'm worried that if I make the wrong command, I might shut down the entire house."
In high-end homes around the country -- think of them as test labs with décor -- advancing technology is outpacing people's ability to deploy it.
If the 1990's brought widespread consumer acceptance of in-home theater, wireless communications, home PC's and smart appliances, the new decade brings promise -- or threat -- of "convergence," the ultimate integration of everything in the house.

Cheryl Ungar for The New York Times

Sensors turn on lights when you get up (or even roll over.)

Some 7.5 million American homes -- about 7 percent -- are currently equipped with a degree of computer networking that automates security, entertainment and lighting, mechanical systems and climate control. That's a leap from less than 2 million homes in 1995, said Todd Thibodeaux, vice president of market research at the Consumer Electronics Association in Arlington, Va.
The most advanced homes -- 3 to 4 percent, according to the National Association of Home Builders -- can coordinate heating and air conditioning, security, lighting and home entertainment, Internet and e-mail even from afar, by cable, computer and satellite, through telephone lines and modem connections.
Appliances like window shades or even vacuum cleaners can be taught to monitor themselves according to internal codes.
But faced with a houseful of gizmos designed to be more helpful than a geisha-in-training and options as varied and complex as the Kamasutra's, homeowners are vacillating between childlike thrill and abject helplessness. Even the adept say they feel inept in their smart-aleck houses.

First, Master the Lingo
Following is a highly selective lexicon of terms that homeowners might encounter when trying to set up a house with smarts:
CAT 5 For Category 5, a rating system that refers to the number of twisted pairs of wires in a telephone cable. The more twists, the greater bandwidth and speed and the less interference in the transmission of voice and computer data. Specifying Cat 5, over the more common Cat 3, is an inexpensive upgrade.
CRESTRON A popular total home control product based on a wireless radio-frequency touch panel and central control processor capable of interacting with everything from the thermostat to Nasdaq.
DSL Digital subscriber line, one of several methods for delivering high-speed, ever-ready access to the Internet, 5 to 30 times as fast as traditional telephone-line modems. It also lets users make and receive phone calls while surfing the net.

EARLY ADOPTER Beloved by high-tech manufacturers, the early adopter is a consumer willing to try any new technology.
MACRO A lengthy series of instructions dictated to a home controller that reduces a complex process to a single command, so one button can dim the lights, lower the shades and start a movie.
PLASMA SCREEN A flat-screen monitor, approximately three to five inches thick, for screening digital, satellite, video, cable and television programs. It can also be used as a computer. Note: Not all plasma screens are HDTV compatible.

RF TECHNOLOGY Radio frequency technology allows wireless appliances to work. In most remote controls, point-and-change infrared technology may be more common, but RF is the wave of the future. The advantage is that it doesn't have to be pointed and that its signals even penetrate walls.
The disadvantage: its range is only 150 to 500 feet.
SAF Spousal acceptance factor, a term found most frequently on the tags used by showrooms and in esoteric stereophile magazines -- as in, "the SAF on these six-foot-tall electrostatic speakers is zero." For "spouse," of course, read "wife."
TECHHOME.ORG The Consumer Electronics Association's Web site, with an easy-to-follow, hype-free guide to networking a home, from the simplest systems to the most complex.

JULIE V. IOVINE

"People haven't even figured out how to control the thermostat," observed Raymond Boggs, a technology analyst at International Data Corporation, a Framingham, Mass., market research company. "It's scary that people haven't asked themselves why they really need to open the front door for the plumber by remote."
Or why it can take three computer-savvy consultants from different fields to figure out why a homeowner's window shades aren't working.
Architects like Scott Phillips, in Manhattan, say they are watching in dismay as some of their jobs -- and budgets -- go to specialists setting up the new machines for living.

"It's all gotten very complicated, far beyond the architect's means," Mr. Phillips said.

Elliot Fishkin of Innovative Audio, a showroom with branches in Manhattan and Brooklyn, is one of the new digital caretakers, on 24-hour call, seven days a week (at about $75 an hour) to indulge human frailty. Mr. Fishkin watched as one client sold a house, lock, stock and remotes soon after it was wired because he found the controls too daunting.
Most clients don't abandon ship: they just call Mr. Fishkin, day or night, weekend or holiday, when control panels start flashing incomprehensible messages. He once got up from Thanksgiving dinner to drive 40 minutes to a client's home to fix a stereo system.

"The biggest problem," Mr. Fishkin said, "is that people start to panic and push too many buttons taking them down pathways where they have no idea what to do," and end up undoing hours of previous programming.
Back in 1879 -- long before Michael Mozer was heckled by his computer -- the German scholar Friedrich Theodor Vischer coined an expression for a particularly modern paranoia, "the cunning of objects."
When he comes home at night, Mr. Mozer, a computer science professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is accosted not by a spouse (he's single) but by his computer screen. "Ack!" it flashes, "You're home 23 minutes early today."
Mr. Mozer, an extreme adopter, has turned the 19th-century schoolhouse he inhabits into a lab for experimental technologies, with computers, video cameras and multiple sound and motion sensors to anticipate his every move.
It turns on the lights at 6 p.m. (his usual arrival time). It sets the temperature at 70 degrees (his ideal). When he's working into the night, the computer lights the way to his bedroom; when he gets out of bed, sound sensors pick up the creaking floorboards and turn on the bathroom lights.
There are glitches. Those same sensors turn the bathroom lights on whenever Mr. Mozer rolls over on a windy night.
"The house is just trying to understand my activities based on patterns," he said, "but sometimes I find it playing with my mind."
And programming his behavior.
"When I'm out late with friends," Mr. Mozer admitted, "I start thinking maybe I better get back home, because that's what the system expects me to do and I don't want to let it down."
W E'RE in limbo right now," said Alex Pentland, the academic head of M.I.T.'s Media Lab, where much of the new home technology is incubated. "If you stand back and forget the hype, you have to ask yourself, Do you really want your microwave to talk to your refrigerator? What's it going to say? We have yet to come up with something that people really care about. And that's why a lot of these things aren't going to last."
Gopal Ahluwalia, head of research at the National Association of Home Builders, predicted that many of them won't even happen. He is among the first to hear about technological upgrades, from high-speed Internet connections to talking appliances, that builders think of adding to new homes.
Last week, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, new frontiers in home networking were all the rage.
Panasonic contributed a microwave that could respond to recipe instructions delivered by Internet. From Home Automated Living, a small Maryland company, there was a voice-controlled house, called HAL 3000, in homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey." Microsoft presented a refrigerator that kept track of groceries and made its own shopping list.
"There's no good reason for a lot of it," Mr. Ahluwalia said, citing the linking of telephones and vacuum cleaners as an example. "When the phone rings, the vacuum cleaner automatically turns off. I say: 'Don't do it! No one will ever be able to vacuum again.' "
Common sense, however, is not what attracts early adopters like Mr. Soros and Mr. Markus to spend the money -- $50,000 is an entry-level figure on what is primarily custom work and is constantly being updated.
In a home-automated conspiracy to make his teenage son take out the trash, one Long Island homeowner temporarily installed a program that activated speakers and a timer when security cameras showed the boy hanging out in his bedroom.
A buzzer went off and didn't stop until the chore was done.

For many homeowners, living with the future has become more chore than challenge. Take the automated LiteTouch lighting system at the Markus residence. Each panel has a multitude of Tic-Tac-size buttons inscribed with tiny lettering to indicate different light schemes -- "cabinet lights" to "zombie," a setting low enough so that Mr. Markus, an insomniac, can wander about. But every time his wife goes to turn on the lights, she has to put on her glasses. As she does, Mr. Markus said, she shoots him a dirty look.
Architects have their own complaints. Where once their clients were focused on aesthetic issues, now they are fixated on where to put the flat-screen monitor and the six surround-sound speakers. Retrofitting, or rewiring a house that is already built or significantly under way, can be a headache. Wiring with coaxial cable or fiber optics and hiding everything under rugs (or carefully threading it along the wall) might take a specialist 40 hours to four weeks.
Fiber-optic wires can be especially tricky, as they must be coiled, not bent, to avoid upsetting the flow of data. Installing the equipment and its behind-the-scenes "brain" might add another three to five days. Add three to five hours of intensive tutorials for the owners to learn how to master their new machines. Optional, of course.
"The interesting thing is that people get the stuff and don't use it," said Dennis Wedlick, a New York architect. "They set the lighting once and never change it. They leave the shades somewhere in the middle to avoid the hassle. The systems are not user friendly. And they're difficult to integrate into the house. But people still want it all."
About three-quarters of Mr. Wedlick's residential work now involves smart technology. At one house for a client who works at home, there is an audio system that broadcasts background office noise -- both to make the homeowner feel more motivated and also to make phone-callers take him more seriously than they might if they heard, for instance, the dishwasher in the background.
William Georgis, a Manhattan architect with blue-chip clients, is already predicting a backlash. "People are extremely busy, and they don't have the time or the inclination to learn how to use it all," he said. "Clients are telling me, 'No more, please!' Of course, these are people who can fall back on their staff to take care of anything."
Joyce Rigatti, an operations manager on Wall Street, is butler-free, but she still has plenty of help. Ms. Rigatti, who travels frequently and is single, plans to spend $90,000 to give her Staten Island home some smarts, with a master plan drawn by Michael Gargiulo of Audio House in Brooklyn. She'll be able to de-ice her sidewalk from her laptop when she's abroad if she hears it's snowing in New York.
Cameras let her monitor who's at the front door and watch her nephews horsing around in the basement.
"Luckily, Michael is on 24-hour call," she said, recalling the night she returned home from Las Vegas and couldn't remember the code to turn off the alarm.
"We are not there yet when it comes to the smart house," said Paul Saffo, the director of the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley forecasting center. "People need to ask themselves first, 'What fits into my life?' Whatever doesn't work should go into the trash, or rather into the garage, where it can be sold a few years later on eBay."
A T Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., computer jocks are developing a whole-house control network called Easy Living and comparing it to the ubiquitous voice-activated computers on the Starship Enterprise. ("Beam me up some reggae on the DVD, Scotty.")
Like other advanced home networks in the R&D stage, Easy Living incorporates wireless technology but does not completely escape the coils of cables, wires and interfaces. Gathering clues from voice commands as well as from constant video surveillance, a homeowner's recorded patterns or even the wave of a hand, a computer network might make tea or tell you where you left your car keys.
Steven Shafer, a senior researcher at Microsoft, expects some of the Jeeves ian technology to be available within two years. But the entire system, he said, will take longer to perfect. "The big question is how to make it all simple enough," he said. "Anyone using this technology in the next 10 years had better be a techie or else be prepared to be very confused."
Mr. Shafer confessed that he lives "in a very conventional house." Nothing automated.
His reason? "I'm one of the people," he said, "who believe a little bit of knowledge can make home a distressing place to try and live in."

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