For years, Bill Gates' burning desire to take over your living room has been the butt of innumerable disdainful jokes. And there is something absurd about the idea of having the same PC that crashes just as you're about to finish a 30-minute download control your house. But the Xbox 360 is no joke — not as a game console, a DVD player, or as a Media Center extender. Neither are the latest Media Center Edition PCs, like HP's home theater-friendly z556 Digital Entertainment Center — winner of an Editors' Choice Award (see page 46). And neither is Vista, the freshly minted latest version of Windows, which comes with some powerful home-automation tools.
Columbus, Ohio-based start-up Exceptional Innovation wants to radically redefine home automation by offering a completely plug 'n' play solution that runs off Media Center Edition PCs. No more having PCs in the home office and the kids' room and audio and video servers in the home theater — your computers handle everything. No more marathon sessions to get everything up and running. (And no more dealing with separate teams of custom installers and IT guys.) Add a device to the network from anywhere in the house, and EI's Lifeware software recognizes it and welcomes it aboard, making it a full-fledged member of the family.
Think of Lifeware as the iPod writ large. It wasn't the player itself that made the 'Pod such a phenomenal success, but its carefully conceived and executed infrastructure. The hardest thing about using an iPod is finding the right port to plug it into. Once your computer knows the player's there, it fires up iTunes and immediately sends all the stored music tracks over to the 'Pod. Add more tracks to iTunes and, the next time you plug in the player, everything is instantly updated. After you've experienced that kind of ease of use, it's hard to have much patience with more elaborate, complicated, and limited control systems.
To achieve iPod-like convenience and flexibility, Lifeware uses a protocol called Web Services for Devices (the kind of awkward, vaguely Germanic name only a computer engineer could love). Simply put, WSD allows everything to talk to everything else, as long as it's part of the home network. It doesn't matter if it's a plasma TV or a security camera or a thermostat or a laptop PC — it just needs to be Lifeware-compatible. And because your network is also on the Web, you can use a VPN (virtual private network) connection to tap into your home system from any Windows XP computer anywhere to check on the house, make adjustments to the system, and feed it new content.
Handling 36 audio zones, 19 HVAC zones, 120 security zones, and 295 lighting zones would be an awfully tall order for any control system, but it's one the Media Center-based Lifeware system seems to handle without complaint in Moorer's Williamsburg-inspired new-construction home. In fact, the only hiccup I experience during a whole day spent prowling the place is when the HP Digital Entertainment Center in the great room refuses to read a flash-memory card. (The solution is simple: Sneaker-net the card to the HP DEC in the master bedroom, which reads it just fine and makes its images available to all of the installation's 30 video screens.)
The Lifeware system is so successfully implemented in Moorer's home that there's little point in talking about the configuration of the individual rooms. What matters most is that everything's available everywhere, to everyone, at any time, at the same time. Say you're in the kitchen making a late-night cup of hot chocolate while answering some e-mail on the HP Media Center laptop on the counter, and you decide to check out the TV listings. Scanning them in a separate window on the laptop screen, you see that Repo Man is starting in 10 minutes on Flix. Still at the laptop keyboard, you turn on the bedroom TV and audio system, dim the lights there, change the channel to Flix, and, to get yourself in the mood, dip into the music collection to play some Circle Jerks over the Klipsch ceiling speakers in the kitchen. About the only thing Lifeware doesn't do is plunk the mini marshmallows into the cocoa for you.
Of course, you didn't have to use the laptop to do this. You could have tapped the wall-mounted Lifepoint controller with its high-def, widescreen touchpanel, or the touchscreen on the palm-size, wireless Samsung Q1 PC resting on the other counter. Or you could have walked over to the adjoining great room and used a traditional hard-button remote to make all the adjustments via the 58-inch screen on the HP rear-projection DLP HDTV there.
The system's basic functions are familiar — feed a DVD or CD into any one of the home's 12 HP Media Center PCs or the 2-terabyte Lifestorage server ($8,000), and it's immediately added to the collection. Meanwhile, the system goes online to retrieve the cover art and other pertinent info. It's the degree of integration that's unprecedented. Jack a camcorder into the network, and your home video immediately becomes accessible — even on a laptop halfway around the world. Ditto for snapshots on a memory card.
Try this one on for size: You've planned an elaborate summer party that's going to sprawl through most of the main rooms of the first floor and out into the backyard pool area. Since you'll have your hands full once guests start to arrive, you program the system a few hours ahead of time, knowing you can always tweak your scenario along the way and make on-the-fly adjustments once everybody's there. Using any of the video screens in the network, you stage the following Lifescene:
- At 6:30, a half hour before the first guests are due to arrive, all the rooms you don't want people wandering into will be locked down.
- At the same time, the security cameras for the driveway and front door will come up on the video monitors throughout the house so you can check for arriving guests as you're getting ready in the bedroom and bathroom.
- At 6:45, the pool cover will roll back.
- You set the thermostat so the house will be 72° when people first arrive, but then have it drop to 68° at 8, as the accumulating guests start to heat the rooms up.
- The blinds on the west side of the house will close at 8, so the rooms won't be flooded with light from the sunset.
- The patio lights will come up at 8:30, as it begins to get dark out back. Meanwhile, the house lights will come on as well, but at a relatively dim, mood-setting level.
- The music you're blasting as you run around getting everything ready will drop back to a more conversation-friendly level right at 7. But at 9, as the party kicks into high gear, the music videos you've got stored on the Media Center hard drives will start playing on the various video screens, and the whole-house audio system will go up a few dB.
- At 1 a.m., after everyone's gone, the lights both inside and outside the house will dim, all the outside doors will lock, the security system will be alarmed, the blinds on the west side of the house will reopen, the pool cover will roll back into place, the TVs will shut off, and background music will play for an hour as you finish cleaning up and get ready for bed.
You'll soon be able to write even more elaborate scenarios as a variety of Lifeware-compatible smart appliances is introduced. A TMIO intelligent oven ($7,495) — which, among things, refrigerates food until a programmed trigger tells it to start cooking — is already available, and household essentials such as ranges, refrigerators, washers, and dryers are on the horizon.
A system this sophisticated in a house this big doesn't come cheap, of course — the ticket on Moorer's installation is a hefty $500,000 — but Lifeware is really meant to handle just about any size home in need of sophisticated automation. And to help make its products easily accessible to anyone who wants to check them out, EI is featuring Lifeware in simulated home environments in Magnolia Audio Video stores, starting with two new locations in Santa Clara and Santa Monica, California.
But all this praise for Lifeware's execution doesn't address the 500GB gorilla in the living room. Everybody knows that computers crash, and who wants to have to reboot his house — especially when you have everything electronic, including your security system, wired into the network? But there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- No system is foolproof, and high-end proprietary rigs are as prone to operating glitches as any Media Center PC-based installation. Also, the more third-party gear a proprietary system has to assimilate, the more prone it is to acting up.
- When a Media Center PC is dedicated to running a home-automation system (as opposed to being used by every member of the family to do homework, pay the bills, and perform all kinds of other conflicting tasks that can cause system crashes), it can be extremely robust. But for anybody who still worries about having a PC in charge, EI offers a Windows XP-driven Lifecontroller ($3,500) to handle system-management chores so that the computers become just another part of the system, not its hub.
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Equipment Control Room |
| RACKS A Russound audio zone controllers and amplifiers B Network hub with Lifecontroller, Lifestorage A/V servers, HP DECs, and routers C Altronix security camera panel with routers D AC power supplies PANELS 1 Russound house-audio speaker patch panel 2 Whole-house audio keypads and Lifepoint controllers 3 Lifepoint touchpanel power supply — Panel 1 4 Lifepoint touchpanel power supply — Panel 2 5 Cable-TV distribution panel 6 Satellite-TV distribution panel 7 Phone distribution panel 8 Home-network distribution panel 9 Aprilaire thermostat panel 10 Power distribution panel 11 — 13 DSC security-system panels 14 — 17 House-security access control panels |
If EI's Lifeware is indeed a glimpse of the likely future, though, it might be time for even the most hardened computerphobes to think about welcoming a PC into their home-entertainment systems. Silicon is working its way into just about every kind of A/V component anyway, and a reasonably priced system that can take advantage of your existing computers while easily assimilating all manner of third-party gear would seem a godsend for just about any homeowner.
Is Exceptional Innovation's Lifeware the real deal? Well, in this one elegantly tricked-out Columbus home, it seemed real enough to me.
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Equipment List |
| Exceptional Innovation (6) Lifetouch 8.9-inch touchscreen controllers (6) Lifetouch 12.1-inch touchscreen controllers Lifecontroller system controller Lifestorage 2-terabyte A/V server Lifevision analog/digital TV distributor HP (12) z558 Digital Entertainment Centers (4) Pavilion Slimline desktop PCs z5190 laptop with Media Center m7360n Pavilion desktop Media Center PC vs17e 17-inch LCD monitor (2) f2105 21-inch widescreen LCD TVs (7) lc3260n 32-inch LCD TVs (4) pl5060n 50-inch plasma TVs md5880n 58-inch DLP rear-projection TV Photosmart 475 printer Photosmart 3210 printer Microsoft (3) Xbox 360 game consoles Samsung Q1 ultra mobile PC Russound (4) R1250MC 12-channel amplifiers (6) CAV6.6 A/V controllers Sim2 HT500E-Link 720p 3-chip DLP front projector VuTEC SilverStar 120-inch screen Integra (2) Integra DTR-10.5 A/V receiver Integra DTR-7.6 receiver (2) Integra DPS-10.5 DVD players Klipsch (2) Klipsch THX Ultra 2 home-theater speaker systems (100) Klipsch ceiling and in-wall speakers Nevo (7) NevoSL universal remote controls CLO Systems X-Arm motorized plasma mount Linksys (5) SRW2048 48-port network switch AdTran NetVanta 2100 router Insteon (77) lighting-system controls Vantage (320) Infusion lighting controls Aprilaire (19) 8870 communicating thermostats Heatizon (3) CBX6/23 radiant-heat control boxes Panasonic (2) BBHCM381A security cameras (20) BBHCM331A security cameras DSC (120) Maxsys security contacts Gaia power technology whole-house battery backup |
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