At just 48 years of age, Drew Snodgrass had already become a digital dinosaur. While many of his contemporaries were in Circuit City drooling over 60-inch flat-panel HDTVs and the latest laptops, Drew and his wife, Chris Monty, curled up in front of a trusty 27-inch Sony wedged into a corner of the family room, a mass of wires running to a VCR and DVD player. “It looked like a college dorm,” Drew said. “It was a mess.” Not that they really cared. While the family used PCs, watched DVDs, and played videogames, they were mostly oblivious to the technological changes happening all around them.
From left, Drew Snodgrass, Chris Monty, and their sons, Max and Zach, enjoy their Dell notebook PCs and Gateway plasma TV.
Routers? Wireless connections? Fugedda-boutit. Drew once tried to hook up a router but couldn't figure it out. This family's idea of a shared connection was to unplug the DSL modem from their main computer and let the kids drag the cable up the stairs to use in their own PCs. When it came to technology, day-to-day life remained tied to the proven tools of the past, like ballpoint pens, film cameras, and a family calendar stuck to their fridge.
But last March all that suddenly changed. That's when the microchip giant Intel came knocking, ready to give the Monty–Snodgrass family an Extreme Digital Makeover. And the results changed their lives.
Special Delivery
Intel wanted to see how people who aren't particularly sophisticated about technology would use a connected home, one in which all sorts of digital files — including movies, music, snapshots, and home videos — can be accessed and transferred inside and even outside the house with ease. Why the interest? Because “once we learn how people use technology, we can create chips to help develop the future products people will want,” said Eric Dishman, a social scientist in Intel's People and Practices research group.
Nothing about the Monty–Snodgrass house would make it an obvious makeover candidate. Situated on a quiet street in Tigard, Oregon, the cozy three-story home is surrounded with lush landscaping, meandering pathways, and a calming pond complete with waterfall and filled with Japanese koi fish. Drew makes his living as a landscape architect, and he designed the house and grounds to be a quiet haven for him; Chris, a 45-year-old real-estate agent; and their two sons — Max, 17, and 13-year-old Zach.
It's also where both parents work. Drew could usually be found in his basement office, hunched over site plans, while Chris was upstairs in her crowded ground-floor bedroom turned office, researching properties for her clients. The kids, meanwhile, were either in their bedrooms or in the basement, playing with their Xbox on a big, old Mitsubishi tube TV.
While the family was looking forward to the large-screen HDTV that Intel had promised, they got much more than that. By the time the Intel crew was finished, their home had been transformed into a high-tech showcase — the coolest house in the neighborhood.
In the family room, the 27-inch TV was history, replaced by a 42-inch Gateway enhanced-definition plasma set, a Bose 3•2•1 GS home theater system, a Web cam, and a Niveus AVX Media Center PC, with a Philips ProntoPro remote to control everything. The centerpiece of the family room's electronics, the AVX runs Windows Media Center Edition and has a video hard-disk recorder, a TV tuner, and a built-in DVD player/recorder. It offers TiVo-like functionality, allowing you to stop and fast-forward live programs. A full-featured Pentium 4 PC, the AVX also has a keyboard, four USB ports, an Ethernet connection for routing files throughout the house, and a 300-gigabyte hard drive.
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In the basement, a 57-inch widescreen Toshiba rear-projection HDTV, joined to a Gateway FMC-901 Family Media Center computer, became the new display for the Xbox. While the small bedroom TV remained, it was now hitched to a Gateway Connected DVD player, which includes a wireless 802.11g Wi-Fi card and router. The kids got new media-friendly computers, with Max using a Dell Precision 360/MT PC, complete with two flat-panel monitors for doing video editing, and Zach using an all-in-one Gateway 610XL Media Center PC.
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Both Chris and Drew now use wireless Dell Latitude D600 notebook PCs in their offices, and they can work anywhere in the house thanks to an 802.11b Linksys wireless router tucked away in a closet. Also, everyone in the family received a Samsung SPH-i700 cellphone, which doubles as a pocket PC, personal organizer, MP3 music player, and camera. And the family calendar is no longer on the fridge but on Microsoft's Web site, ready to be accessed by the Toshiba Satellite P25 notebook PC in the kitchen — or any computer anywhere.
The house is now one big network, with wired and wireless technology connecting every PC and TV to each other, the Internet, and the family's digital cable service. Video can be watched not just on TVs but on PCs as well, digital music and photos can be sent to any room without using wires, and wireless Internet access is available everywhere. The long DSL cable that graced the home's staircase has become a thing of the past.
Max uses a Samsung SPH-i700 cellphone, which also functions as a camera, music player, and pocket PC.
While the family received lessons on how to use all their new gear, they weren't told what to do with it. Intel wanted to see how creative they'd be with the technology, not how good they'd be at following orders.
Working Wirelessly
One of the first benefits Drew experienced was in his work. While he knew how to u se a laptop, he still wrote out landscape proposals. But with his new digital camera, he now takes before-and-after pictures of jobs and then organizes them on the Dell notebook PC by various themes. At the same time, he uses the Samsung cellphone/pocket PC to download client files from the office, which help him prepare the proposal.
Now when he goes to see a client, he can use the Dell PC to show them a slideshow of how a similar project developed. “Before I was organized, I'd try to find a picture to present to a client, and then get embarrassed when I couldn't. Now I can immediately find any element and quickly get their reaction to my ideas.” Thanks to the new gear, proposals that used to take him 2 1/2 weeks to prepare are finished in a day.
In his home office, Drew transfers photos from a digital camera to create slideshows for his landscaping clients.
Drew loves to have several things going on at once. “I function well with distractions,” he said. So while preparing his proposals, he often listens to Real's music-subscription service, Rhapsody, streaming it wirelessly into his office from the upstairs Niveus Media Center PC. He also uses Microsoft's Media Center Edition software and his laptop's video tuner card to watch TV. “Rhapsody lets me edit out the music I don't like,” he said. “And with the TV software in my laptop, I can see thumbnails of all available channels and pick the one I want.”
Family Ties
Now that Chris doesn't have to share a DSL connection with the rest of the gang, she can get her work done faster. And if she needs to access the Internet while on the road, she uses her Dell notebook to sign on to the T-Mobile hotspot found in most Starbucks. Those hotspots and the Samsung cellphones allow everybody in the family to keep track of each other's activities by accessing the family calendar stored on Microsoft's MSN.com Web site. Chris laments that she's been so busy that she can't keep the calendar up to date. Even so, it's still full of vents.
And this is one busy family. Combine work with school, after-school, athletic, and church activities, then multiply by four, and locating each other can become like a game of Where's Waldo? Instead of having to run downstairs to look at the paper calendar, now everyone can find out who's where on a PC, cellphone, or one of the TVs.
When she has time, Chris wades through shoeboxes filled with forgotten family photos. She digitizes and organizes them on her PC, using a copier/scanner/fax machine, and then displays them in supersized mode on the plasma set or any other TV or PC screen in the house. Their sheer size enhances the experience. “They're so compelling,” Chris said, “that people actually look at them.”
Chris scans family photos into her PC and organizes them for "supersized" display on the Gateway plasma TV.
Digital image capture isn't new to Max, who's been using a digital camcorder for a few years. An avid amateur filmmaker, he loves to chronicle family events. But showing his creations meant plugging the camcorder into a remote TV.
When several friends recently came over prior to the school prom, Max recorded footage, edited it on his Dell PC, and then wirelessly streamed his masterpiece to the downstairs plasma screen directly from his computer, while also burning copies onto DVDs to give to his friends before they left for their big do.
All Together Now
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Every room in the house has become its own command center, a multimedia access node that can retrieve, display, and send video, music, pictures, and more. If the connected home catches on, being sent to your room for misbehaving might not be much of a punishment.
It might sound like the connected home is actually creating the disconnected family, but both Drew and Chris say that's not the case. “My biggest concern was that all this technology would isolate us,” Chris said. “Before, everyone was in my office using the Internet. But it wasn't a good thing. I was worried that with their own PCs, the boys would be online and playing games all the time. That hasn't happened. They get bored doing it.”
Since the family has been using their new technology for only six months, many features remain undiscovered. For example, Chris often forgets that the wireless network allows her to work on her laptop wherever she wants. And she rarely sends files, such as photos, from one room's display to another's. “Max does those things,” she said.
While Drew likes having all his new toys connected, he's most taken by the “unconnected” part of the technology. He enjoys using the Web cam to see Jonathan, his 21-year-old son by a previous marriage, while talking to him in college. And when he needs a change of pace, he takes his notebook PC to other rooms to work, creating a virtual office throughout the house. Drew gets what it means to be untethered. He's even put a printer in his car so he can create proposals for clients on the spot.
Drew wirelessly transfers the photos to a printer/fax machine to make color prints.
Techno Snags
But before Intel and the equipment manufacturers pat themselves on the back, they still have a little work to do. For example, the Niveus AVX Media Center PC, which controls all of the entertainment in the family room, doesn't always work. While the family is watching a show, the picture might freeze or skip, which Chris finds “irritating.” Not being tech-heads, they haven't tried to figure out the problem.
“I get impatient with the Media Center,” said Max. When it freezes, he quickly abandons the connected-home paradigm for more reliable ground. “I just switch to using a single component and its own remote.”
Max does video editing on his Dell Precision 360/MT PC using two flat-panel monitors.
Drew loves the ProntoPro remote. Its ability to control literally every feature on every component makes it the one thing he'd be loath to give up. On the other hand, at close to $1,000, he'd also be loath to buy one, no matter how compelling its features.
Drew also loves Rhapsody, but he's disappointed by the restrictions of the Movielink movie download service. Due to copyright concerns, a downloaded movie can only be played on the hard disk to which it was recorded. And that, Drew believes, just isn't fair. “It seems logical to me that if the file stays within the home, you should be allowed to watch it on a second TV,” he said. “Until they let you share movies around the house, I'd give it up.”
In fact, the devices that take up the most space in the home have had the least impact on the family. While both Drew and Chris have heard about HDTV, neither had thought about signing up for high-def programming. Like many Americans, they're using the fancy sets to watch DVDs and display their photographs. “I love the wide-screen feature of these TVs,” Drew said, “an d the DVD picture quality is excellent.”
While the family hadn't really been thinking about HDTV, our recent visit seemed to change that. “Max is now pushing hard for HDTV,” Drew added, “and I gave him the go-ahead to look into getting it from our cable company.”
Yet even without HDTV, this house is now the place to be. Like the kid who was popular because he always had the best toys, the Monty–Snodgrass home has become the focal point for the sons' friends. A few weeks ago, 40 of Max's closest ones showed up after his church youth group meeting to hang out. Despite the loud voices and high energy, Chris and Drew wouldn't have it any other way. “It gives me a good feeling that Max's friends want to come here, to our house,” she said.
It looks like Intel's connected-home visionaries might be onto something big.