On a similar note, I wanted to love the Chromecast, but I found the phone to be a terrible controller. Now I use a Roku, which has a great remote. Instead of my girlfriend and I crowding ourselves around a tiny smartphone screen to browse what we're going to watch, we bring up the Netflix app on the Roku and browse on the much more suitable TV.
For instance today if you have a Philips hue lights and a windows phone, you pick your phone, screen is off, you press the search button, and says "huestro, set my lights to ..."
Hopefully you'll be able to say that directly from your Xbox one microphone.
But this article is spot on, that's a reason Philips released the pricey "hue tap", a switch that frees you from using a smartphone
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/huetro-for-hue/f...
For one, newer smartphones will mostly come with fingerprint sensors. So no code typing there.
Second, apps launch almost instantly in any recent iOS or Android phone. It's not like you'll wait 1 minute for he app to launch or anything.
Third, "it's already over" over typing and app-launching wait time? Oh, the humanity. I've lived in houses where the thermostat was in a specific room, or even in the basement next to the heater.
>For one, newer smartphones will mostly come with fingerprint sensors. So no code typing there.
You're here assuming that people own the latest phone. You could have smart lights for $150 at some point, it doesn't mean that you have the latest smartphone with fingerprint reader.
>Second, apps launch almost instantly in any recent iOS or Android phone. It's not like you'll wait 1 minute for he app to launch or anything.
Again you're assuming people have the latest smartphones, also even if the app launch immediately, it takes some times to get a connection between your smartphone and your IoT device
>Third, "it's already over" over typing and app-launching wait time? Oh, the humanity. I've lived in houses where the thermostat was in a specific room, or even in the basement next to the heater.
_today's_ user experience with a smartphone is sometimes worst than controlling the device, just because it was much worse some years ago doesn't mean we have to accept it. It is like saying "Get this new car with a maximum speed of 30mph, it's OK people use to ride a horse back in the time"
My point isn't that it's difficult, it's that existing solutions are already better than the smartphone-based ones.
Unlock with fingerprint. App launches aren't that slow on iPhones :/
How about an extension to do it from the notification center? Or even Siri? Neither requires unlocking.
You could technically have an iPhone plugged into a power source and activate Siri with "Hey Siri" and then do your thing.
Then.... we have the Watch :)
I mean, I'd still use my smartphone as a remote for other reasons. But the parent does make a good point.
This is how my home works. I built the app that runs on the screens all the time (a little node.js server and web app), and have a few tablets mounted on the walls. This is a screenshot from October:
http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-content/uploads/home2.png
Since then, I've added a bunch of new controls for dimmable lights and scenes (e.g. turn off all the first floor lights at once, or dim them all to the same percentage).
I built my own, but there are dozens of free pre-built home control apps in the Play Store. I find Wink's very attractive for example: http://i.imgur.com/DUWIwh3.png
I found some fat picture frames at Walmart that attach them to the wall perfectly. Mine have front facing cameras so I used motion sensing to fade them in as you approach them. Its creepy-cool in a good way. Sadly, they don't fade smoothly all the way in from black like an iPad. I'm hoping to upgrade later to jailbroken ipads.
I think it's lack of imagination about where you can use a smartphone for. You don't necessarily need to use the smartphone that's in your pocket!
http://www.bemo.io/ shows that you can have a thermostat with a nice display.
This is a personal opinion, but I consider most of the smartphone apps better designed than for example the graphical user interface of my microwave, thermostat, or laundry machine. I can't wait till these producers are gonna finally give up and:
1.) start to use technology from the smartphone hardware industry with respect to high-resolution screens
2.) start to use the technology from the smartphone software industry with respect to applications and catering to third-parties (app developers) with much better track record in nice interface design
That would really give the home automation stuff a swing!
Some other examples:
* http://www.getmyrico.com/ for security
* https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/xentry-transform-your-spa... for a smart door, but they didn't think it through w.r.t. charging, oops! :-)
* the best one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Dno6FMD3E the laundry machine from Samsung
BTW, Windows 8 8" tablets are now under $100 at Wal-Mart and Best Buy, so you aren't even limited to Android for this kind of thing anymore.
You can find a used nexus one, or a moto e, for example, on Swappa for less than $100.
I think the latter part of the sentence unintentionally describes smartphones. I would say that today's smartphones are integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces. Pretty damn good as well.
I take issue with the first part of the sentence as well. I think we do want a centralized device with centralized software. People are sick of fridge operating one way and stoves working another. Take changing clocks on microwave, coffee machine, fridge, stoves etc for example. Don't you just hate doing it one by one? Not to mention the fact that they all have different interfaces and work differently.
However, if your clocks in all your devices are already connected via a centralized mechanism (say, for example, a standardized home automation bus/wiring/backbone), why is it necessary to set the clocks at all? One way or another, they could be connected to a time server. I don't (shouldn't) need an app to set time on any device.
If you're talking interface unification on each device (say, a touchscreen "standard" interface and OS), that is ... maybe desirable, but potentially impractical or unlikely. With eventual interfaces (to say, fridges or stoves or whatever) being "smart", it's going to become a key differentiator among brands, along with reliability, warranty, ease to clean, energy efficiency. So I could see the manufacturers pushing back on that.
Weighing in with my own anecdote, I have a Nest thermostat in my home. There's an iPad app which I have never used (other than to test) once to adjust the temperature in my home. I walk to the device and do it there. It's faster and easier. And the author of the article addresses this issue.
I agree that we want a centralized intelligence. I personally don't want to carry my smartphone around all the time though. We can't we use what's around us like glass, tables walls or use small projectors that track your positioning?
There is an interesting cultural phenomena where a significant fraction of the population agrees with us, and another significant fraction thinks we're completely crazy, and the two groups do not believe the opposite party exists.
There are so much levels in terms of a smart home, that a smartphone will never be able to handle, because the later one is only a personal thing.
If there are people in a room and it's dark, the light should go on.
That's the default case I want almost every time for every room.
I don't want to use my smartphone or do any activities for this.
Interaction models are something we've been thinking about quite a bit and we've been exploring a number of options. New products like Senic that explore new opportunities are especially exciting for us. Here are 3 rough tenants we've been following when thinking about how people will interact with our product:
1) The smartphone is not the solution, it's a stop on the way to something much better. This is basically the point of OP's article and we completely agree.
2) If it's not broken, don't fix it. In other words, if there's an existing interaction model in the home that everyone is already used to (i.e. light switch, tv remote, wall thermostat) seriously ask yourself if that really (really) needs to change before inventing something new.
3) In slight opposition to #2 there are obviously huge opportunities to innovate the way we interact with our home. Some of the models that I'm quite excited about:
-The "dashboard" model that Sentri is building (http://sentri.me)
-The "voice" model: (i.e. Echo, API.ai, etc.)
-The "gesture" model which is what Senic and a few others are building
Btw, feel free to reach out directly for thoughts/questions/coffee: kevinr@emberlight.co
The flipside of this is IoT as a superpower: finding applications where you can truly use technology to give people a new ability that they didn't have before.
From the personal side, this IoT novelty versus superpower discrepancy is something we thought a lot about as we brought Pantelligent to the world (note: co-founder, https://www.pantelligent.com/ ). Our superpower is to let anyone cook great food, perfectly every time, through science. For us, the smartphone was the perfect user interface, because people are already in the kitchen with smartphone in one hand and spatula in the other! But our integration with the Pebble smartwatch hints at an even better future fit; the Pebble is great for cooking because it's waterproof, and it lets us bring real-time cooking data and instructions right to your wrist, even if your hands are busy.
I have solar panels. I need to regulate energy use to be as much during the day as possible (on sunny days) but keep the total load below 3kw at any time (otherwise I need to go to the grid for extra power).
Make me a system that can turn on the dishwasher, washing machine, pool pump etc at the right time to minimize my electricity bill.
Bonus cred for checking the weather in my exact location, and taking into account coming cloud cover.
I'd pay up to $500 for such a device IF it also generated stats and told me how much solar energy I used as well as my export to the grid.
Is your pan useless with an electric element?
Half of our team has electric stovetops at home; I think it's particularly a superpower there to know the real cooking surface temperature. Why Pantelligent is especially great on electric stovetops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRwQgvod2t4
Clearly the reason many connected devices expect you to bring your own screen is cost - Nest notwithstanding, adding touchscreens to everything when you've already got one in your pocket seems unnecessary, and would clearly add to price of these products.
For example, I don't always walk around my house with my phone. Sometimes I wear pants/shorts without pockets. Or I have to leave my phone plugged in somewhere cause it's charging. Or maybe cause I'm taking a shower and realized that I may have left the oven on and my roommate is out and I left my phone in my bedroom, and it would be awesome to be able to yell a question to my house and just have to dealt with. Or I have friend over and I want them to be able to play around with some of the coolness, but I don't want to fuck around with getting them to install the app, and syncing the authentication code, etc etc.
I mean, we can 'argue' about cost. But seriously, you're wiring up your house for automation and remote access. Enabling additional access nodes is a relatively tiny opportunity cost.
Maybe it's top secret, worthy of some serious VC. But you can probably guess what it is :-)
Now smart phones - she gets those too but she finds it so annoying. Adverts on youtube serve to cause confusion. That action bar on the Android is annoying. She says 'waaah' when the screen is locked. Etc.
Now, the cost and effort to manufacture hardware is dropping and we have the ability to create interfaces that are not designed as a generic device but designed for a specific person or situation.
This feels very true. The music industry has been taking advantage of this for a while, with all kinds of interesting and innovative tactile controllers interacting with music making software. In that domain companies like Native Instruments are addressing exactly the concerns raised by this article. (Interestingly, the author cites playing music as an example of how an appropriately-crafted physical device (i.e. an instrument) lets the operator focus entirely on the task by minimizing cognitive load.)
Just as an example - for changing volume on my pebble, i do this:
1) long-hold the up-button (i have this binded to an app called 'music boss' )
2) hit up or down.
3) volume changes.
There's similar apps for controlling smart lightbulbs, etc, and pretty much expect this to be standard case on android wear / apple watch / microsoft band / etc. in the coming months.
Is there a "multi-user" factor missing that makes a case for products like Senic Flow? Yes, but that wasn't addressed in the essay.
This problem has even spread to Sonos which discontinued the dedicated controller a year or so ago. You now have to use either a phone, tablet, or a full computer to select and choose the music you want to play. Granted their apps are well done but the overall experience is nowhere as responsive as the dedicated controller.
I really do not understand their decision, and would think it would be possible to offer a dedicated controller device these days at a reasonable price that they can make profitable.
We actually haven't yet built a smartphone app, even though our customers have asked for it, simply because we don't know a good way to solve these problems.
Do you take the money and build the app anyway, or come back to them with a new and very different solution to what they asked for?
Take this problem, and apply it to an entire building of office tenants, and you can see why this is valuable to them. But it's one thing for us to create a product and make the sale. It's more important to me that they actually use what we sell them.
I could imagine that learning gestures to control doors, blinds, background music, lighting and wake/sleep procedures like locking all doors, fading lights, putting devices on standby, etc.
I did that a bit more than decade ago with misterhouse using linux on my basement fileserver and X10 devices. Now I'd use insteon because its transport protocol is more reliable. AFAIK there are no license fees.
The expense is in labor. Set up and aiming IR sensors takes more time than writing the "program" for misterhouse. The inevitable labor expense of troubleshooting and fine tuning is huge. This is the main limiter for my own home automation. In the long run controlling my tropical fish tank and the security sensor lights that light the walk from my garage to the house pays off. My hallway to the bathroom doesn't pay off for labor. I hooked up the basement door sensor and got it to work and still haven't hooked up or automated the basement stairs light yet. Its a labor cost thing.
There are also severe depreciation/lifespan issues... a lot of non-automated hardware is designed, built, installed and paid for on the assumption of a 20-30 year working life. Most of the "new wave" of home automation is built to last till the runway runs out or the aquihire, maybe a year lets say. In the long run that is not going to help the entire market.
Probably unpopular in a programming forum, but, aside for people with physical difficulties, did anyone (e.g. more than a few outliers, not literally anyone as in > 0) ever asked for a "smart home"?
And before someone replies with the quote about "faster horsers", did anyone, AFTER shown one, went anything but "meh"?
Anybody that show not just as "nice to have, ok, move on", on the level of battery powered toothbrushes, but as something that really impacts your life.
Seems more to me, like a few other things in tech, like a solution in search of a problem. In the say way nobody asked or wanted those "if you want to talk about your credit card, press 3", etc, automated speech recognition call services.
Do I want to turn on lights, lock the doors, or raise the temp when I'm actually at home with a smartphone? No, that's just silly.
Done well, I would be very keen for home automation. The two rooms at the front of my house have six privacy blinds and six blackout blinds. They are a huge pain to deal with and so I would find very useful a solution that automatically opened the blackout blinds in the morning and closed them in the evening.
Or tracked soil moisture and controlled irrigation around the various areas of my garden. Or handled home security/monitoring.
I thought Microsoft's original Surface (the projection table) was going to end up being a hub for this sort of thing to control a home, store media, browse media schedules, etc but it seems to have fizzled weakly.