A tour of the IBM Pervasive Computing Lab shows future home appliances are full of the Net.

by Cameron Crouch, PC World
June 9, 2000, 5:05 p.m. PT

Every morning you wander into the kitchen and hesitate in front of your refrigerator. Is there any milk? Is it three weeks out of date? And when you travel, you may wonder five miles into the sky whether you remembered to turn off the heat.

Well, busy homeowner, rest assured. Soon you'll be able to digitally control any part of your home from within and from afar, via the Web.

Such is the scenario of the IBM Pervasive Computing Lab in Austin, Texas, where engineers have developed what they call a "living lab." Many of its devices aren't on shelves today, but IBM says they'll appear sooner than you might think.

In May IBM released a software tool kit that complies with its Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) to help developers create applications and services for Web-enabled devices. Within six to twelve months, power-line automation appliances and Web pages like those in the lab will enter a pilot phase, the company says.

A Hub in Your Living Room

The IBM networked home centers on a residential gateway that distributes broadband connections to devices and appliances by power line and wireless 802.11 networks.

The gateway resembles a stereo component and sits next to a large HDTV, controlled with a wireless keyboard or TV-style remote. Through these units you can control your home's electricity and appliances, and tap into Web resources.

Much of the IBM home network is connected using power-line networking. "We use a C-bus modem to modulate bits of data on the power line," says Bill Bodin, senior technical member of IBM's lab. "It's bidirectional and can keep track of energy you use on devices and send it to your energy provider."

In the garage, you might have a car that talks. Speech recognition in vehicles may eliminate mobile phone-related accidents. Among other things, the car in the IBM lab downloads music from a home entertainment system over an 802.11 wireless network.

"Eventually, you would connect via Bluetooth in your garage and CDPD networks on the road," Bodin says.

The car can also search and read e-mail from a Lotus Domino server. It strips the bare essentials and transforms the message from text to speech, Bodin says.

What's Cooking in a Wired Kitchen?

The kitchen in the IBM lab hosts myriad Web-enabled devices, from the phone to the refrigerator. You can access all of your personal information on any of them. In this model home, data access is within about two feet of anywhere.

Bodin used a wireless Web pad to set the space-age oven, which combines hot air and microwave technology to cook conventional oven recipes quickly.

"You can cook a pizza in one minute," he says.

The phone has an Internet touch screen for access to a calendar, addresses, yellow pages, and online shopping.

Even the refrigerator is connected. "You can browse your refrigerator from anywhere," Bodin says. If every item carries a tag readable by radio frequency, you can keep a running inventory.

"Instead of pasting stuff on the fridge, there's a digital library of content," Bodin adds. The door bears a touch-screen display where you can write notes or display digital photos.

Of course, you'll still need magnets to post your child's latest finger-painting masterpiece. Some things won't go digital for a while.

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