Forget Smartphones: Smart Homes Could One Day Serve You Better Than Siri
Ever feel like your house doesn't properly serve your needs? We mean this quite literally. Do the blinds open or close automatically whether it's time for bed or get up in the morning? Does the temperature automatically adjust when you're too hot or cold?
The answer is probably no to both questions. But if billionaire inventor James Dyson’s latest prediction has any merit, your home could one day meet your needs better than the servants of earlier generations.
The 69-year-old British inventor, founder of the Dyson company and creator of the first bagless vacuum cleaner, believes the current smart homes on the market could stand to be a whole lot smarter. He thinks the trendy home systems of today that permit homeowners to control their environment through a screen are “going in the wrong direction.”
Instead, Dyson would like to see – and believes we will see – homes that react to our actions and, perhaps even some day, our desires.
“When you look at the blinds or gesture to the blinds, they open,” he says.
In this vision, factors like temperature, lighting or the level of moisture in the air would automatically adjust to individual preferences, partly by analyzing our biometric data. Say, for example, you’ve just gotten home from a rigorous gym session and you’re feeling a touch overheated; your super-smart home would register this and respond by temporarily lowering the temperature.
These homes of the future wouldn’t just respond to external commands, however; they would also adjust according to changes in temperature, sunlight and other factors in a manner similar to Dyson’s air purifier monitors and momentarily change airflow depending on the surrounding air quality.
This could all be reality in five to 10 years, predicts Dyson.
“We have no need to have the rather basic and crude controls that we have at the moment in the home,” he says. “There’s no need for it.”
h/t Fortune
Banner Photo: Watching TV in a modern home. (Gregor Gruber / Flickr)
