When tech pundits sharpened their pencils this time last year, 2014 was due to be the year when smart home technology took off in the mass market.
For sure, more mainstream consumers have dipped their toe in the home control market, buying internet-connected lightbulbs, thermostats and more, and this was the year the giants of Google and Samsung played major M&A hands. The ball is now rolling, with smart home product revenue forecast by RnR to reach $22.4b by 2020 in the Americas alone.
The Internet Of Things has certainly made great in-roads this year. But much work is left to do. To complete the promised revolution, developers must be mindful of what consumers really want from technology.
In 2014, smart home technology is all about the novelty and wonder of simply connecting everyday appliances to the internet. Tech fans, in particular, marvel at the perceived upgrade of enabling light control from a smartphone. Yet, the more we connect up our homes, the more we realise the fundamental flaw with today’s Internet Of Things technologies – the interface needs a great deal of improvement.
Replacing your lightbulbs with smart lighting may give you remote light control from a touchscreen, but the extra complication of having to leave your light switches turned on and to instead use your smartphone is a retrograde, not a forward, step.
Many connected gadgets, lightbulbs and smart plugs among them, cease to be smart or remotely controllable the moment you flip off their regular old mechanical switches back at home. The industry’s evolution is stuck between two eras of interface – but the consumer frustration felt at the apex of these approaches will threaten to derail the sector’s development if not bridged now.
The solution, perhaps counter-intuitively, does not lay in offering owners more and more control. If the hardware makers get their wish and consumers buy more and more connected devices, home dwellers will wind up with a multitude of separate apps for all the distinct functions of their property, resulting in what I call Peak Gadget – we will have to unlock and fiddle with our phones just to get up and go to the bathroom.
No, the future should be about giving consumers natural, seamless ways of interacting with smart devices – devices that communicate with each other, allowing users to issue just one instruction, passed on to all networked devices, rather than a set of commands to multiple gadgets. We should reclaim the concept of "home automation" – which has become too synonymous with the idea of merely connectivity – and help homes function with minimal occupant direction.
For room lights, that means coming on and off only when users enter and leave a room, and only at certain times. For heating systems, it should responding to householders’ comings and goings in the right way, turning up the furnace when the first occupant leaves work.
Of course, some smart home devices already make a stab at this modality – but, often end up with half-baked executions. A device may purport to be "intelligent" but, such is the illogic of its logic system (detecting proximity from its fixed location in one particular room), earns a fail for the owner who had to post: "If I watch a two hour movie, away mode kicks in."
The whole industry today is caught between dumb, old mechanical home controls and digital devices that add too much extra intelligence too quickly, creating domestic friction.
Being seamless and natural does not mean fitness trackers that bold on to wrists and require charging every five days. It means embedding biological awareness in to clothing fabrics and powering the damned things using the body’s kinetic energy. That is what the Internet Of Things should be striving toward.
Manufacturers are making their first fumbling steps toward the kind of connected environments that will not complicate users’ lives but simplify them, the kind of products that will not be adopted sparsely and awkwardly by early adopters but by mainstream consumers the world over.
To really do so in the year ahead, they must quickly ensure the smart home future fades in to the background, not stick out like a sore thumb.
