For those who recall the Tomorrow's World programmes of the 60s and their laughably inaccurate visions of robots spinning round the floors of your average 80s apartment, homes of the future are best treated with some scepticism.
Either they tend to be stuffed full of concept products from a designer's drawing board that will never see the light of day or else they are an excuse for corporate flag-waving. So it came as a pleasant surprise to visit Orange's home of the future, called Orange at Home, which neither feels like a left-over from the set of The Fifth Element nor a cheap publicity stunt to promote mobile phones.
According to Mike Crawshaw, head of Orange's Consulting Group, the idea of its home is to use tried and tested technologies that can be upgraded later if necessary. "Our home is deliberately set in the near future, between 2003 and 2005, so it doesn't seem at all far fetched. It's a real behavioural research centre where we will assess what technology people like and what they don't like."
Indeed, so seriously is Orange taking the project it is working with the universities of Surrey and Portsmouth to find an appropriate family to fill the home for six weeks to assess how real people will use the various technologies. Unlike other homes of the future, Orange's "keeping it real" policy also meant opting for a typical, older-style house that ordinary people might live in.
Several properties were viewed but the mobile phone giant eventually plumped for a detached Victorian farmhouse, now situated on the edge of a sprawling business park opposite Computacenter's UK headquarters in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Working with interior designers Urban Salon, the house has, over the past six months, been updated for modern living. And while total investment on the project has already reached £2 million, Orange claims there is still a lot more work to do.
From the outside the only indications that the house is not your typical 1850s period property are the newly-added conservatory, complete with solar panels (these generate around one third of the home's electricity) and the presence of round-the-clock security guards. Inside, however, it is a very different story: the house is packed with hundreds of state-of-the-art gadgets as well as the technologies that enable them all to communicate with one another. To adjust the heating and lighting, even run the bath water to the correct temperature and depth, the home's inhabitants can punch details into a Compaq iPaq handheld PDA (personal digital assistant). This PocketPC uses a high-speed 1.5Mb/sec Wireless Lan (Local area network) connection to communicate directly with the home server located inside a converted cloakroom cupboard.
Digital video and music can also be streamed either from the home server or in the usual way from the conventional AV devices (again, these are stuffed inside the cloakroom cupboard). A computer monitor in the main office provides access to the home's internet portal full of local information, and this can also display video pictures from TV or satellite or from various video cameras positioned around the home.
If you are moving around the house, you can use the PDA to flick between different radio and TV stations and even adjust volumes and settings on the camouflaged outdoor hi-fi systems. Alternatively, for those less familiar with PDAs, the Orange home incorporates different display devices, including Panja touch-screen wall panels and large Hitachi LCD web tablets.
Certain parts of the house, such as the kitchen, also offer voice-activated services and the plan is to extend this technology to all parts of the house over the next few months. Based on Orange's existing Wildfire voice mail technology, the current voice-activated system works with a clip-on microphone to enable users to bark instructions at the washing machine or coffee percolator. They respond after a delay of a few seconds.
"One area where voice activation may be particularly useful is in the home's gym," explains Crawshaw. "If you're busy on one of the machines, for example, you may want to instruct the home network to change TV channels or check the video camera in one of the bedrooms to make sure the baby's OK."
Of course, control of the home devices is not confined to the home. Being a cellular network provider, Orange has not missed the opportunity to show how a mobile phone could be used to complement the in-house operating systems by providing control outside the home. For example, using Wap or conventional SMS text technology, all the home's devices can be accessed remotely by the user. Tap in a six-digit Pin number, user name and password into your mobile and it is possible to open the front door for another family member. (The home does not use conventional keys.)
Alternatively, the mobile can be used to set the lighting and heating to appropriate levels for when you arrive home. With the advent of third-generation phone technology, one option may be to send images from the home's security cameras to the mobile phone.
Clearly, the networked home presents a number of opportunities for companies like Orange. However, the key to success will be assessing which ones people are likely to use and which are likely to be consigned to the technology trash can. But one thing is certain: when the real family moves into the home in April, Orange should be in a much better position to predict the future than the Tomorrow's World research teams were back in the 1960s.
