8 ms·

Smartphone ≠ smart home

86 points by jansen 12y ago

jsnk 12y ago
"We believe that the future of smart homes will not be found in a centralized device but in an integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces." 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.
- twald 12y ago
  Hey, one of the founders here. When we talk about integrated, we're talking about sensors integrated in the materials like tables and walls around us. It does not mean that all of these components should be integrated in one device. I did not phrase this well enough. Thanks! 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?
  - VLM 12y ago
    "I personally don't want to carry my smartphone around all the time though" 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.
- jat850 12y ago
  I'm a little torn on this article, and even on your comment. I think the clock example you pick out is important. 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.
blacksmith_tb 12y ago
Well, sure, bad interfaces to 'smart home' devices will be unpleasant to use. But most things like Wemo, Hue, etc. still let you hit their wall switch. Their 'smartness' is additive, if you have a screen to control them with. 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.
- twald 12y ago
  I agree. And that's exactly one of the big changes that are happening. Prices for hardware components and manufacturing are dropping and we now have the ability to think about more suitable interfaces. I stopped using my lifx after a week because I did not have a fast and simple interface to control them.
PinguTS 12y ago
What I am missing with all the smart home thing and only the Nest has done right is, that the smartphone is a personal thing. But switch on a light or similar is not a personal thing, if you are living with a family with kids. In particular if you have smaller kids, which don't have a small device and must be able to switch on the light or similar. 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.
- k__ 12y ago
  Also, stuff like light doesn't need explicit interaction most of the time. 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.
scrumper 12y ago
I agree with the author's thesis, that smartphones, as generic information processing tools, offer poor user interfaces for controlling things in our physical environment. 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.)
seltzered_ 12y ago
You didn't mention the smartwatch at all in your essay. As someone living with one (a pebble) daily for the past year, many of the smarthome needs have been extending into working with the smartwatch, and they don't have the painpoints you describe. 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.
- twald 12y ago
  You're right. I'm going to talk about them in particular in a follow up post. I wear a pebble as well and I used to use it to control volume. I see smartwatches taking a big place in smart homes. Our issues were that they were not a shared control, you still had to use vision as your primary sensor input, battery life, screen size and problems with connectivity. But I'm confident some of these issues will be resolved soon.
  - erohead 12y ago
    I like the idea of all of these things working together (phone, Pebble, Flow) to enable people to control their devices with whatever is available.
    - seltzered_ 12y ago
      Yep. I'm really seeing a near-term future of using a touchpad or kinect-like device for control, but more importantly paired with the smartwatch for vibration feedback / engaging into a gesture mode. There's no hard rule that a watch has to only connect to a smartphone. And if you look at the Apple's acquisition of Primesense (kinect-sensor folks) and upcoming introduction of 'Taptics' into the Apple Watch, my guess is that these things will work together. I've been trying to prototype this as an experimental addon to my touch plugin thimbleup.com (and sure, I'd love to eventually make it work with Senic Flow too). Testers have noted making continuous gestures/controls need a bit of 'stickiness' to it -- something that makes the gesture feel that if you use it enough, you don't have to rely solely on your eyes. A smartwatch takes care of that if it can manage the battery-life of being a low-latency bluetooth mode to get feedback data quickly,
joeframbach 12y ago
I have my previous-generation phone that I don't use anymore, plugged in, connected to wifi, on a shelf. It's an integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces, and solves the multi-user issue because it's out in the open on a shelf, and it's not my personal device anymore so I don't have sensitive information on it. The apps are right on the home screen, no passcode, just a direct-to-the-app experience. You can find a used nexus one, or a moto e, for example, on Swappa for less than $100.
untog 12y ago
Smartphone controlled anything never feels great to me. If I have to type in code to unlock my keypad, then wait for an app to launch, just to change the temperature on the thermostat, it's already over. 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.
- pbreit 12y ago
  I think actually you need both. The Amazon fire tv's remote is critical but I miss not being able to cast from a phone.
- seivan 12y ago
  So much wrong with your statement... 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 :)
  - lelandbatey 12y ago
    And yet all of those actions pale in comparison to just picking up a remote with nice tactile buttons and using it immediately, no weird navigation, no apps, nothing. I mean, I'd still use my smartphone as a remote for other reasons. But the parent does make a good point.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      So, instead of the phone (which for most people is always with you), have an extra task-specific remote, to feed with batteries, lose, and go fetch from another room when you need it. Plus "nice tactile buttons"? 2005 called. Of all the things one would need those for, setting a thermostat (which takes like 5 seconds) is very low in utility...
compumike 12y ago
The connected lightbulb example is great. That's IoT as a novelty; it adds few/trivial new capabilities, and it adds a lot of inconvenience. 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/ 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.
- scott_karana 12y ago
  Your Kickstarter campaign appears to only show gas burners. Is your pan useless with an electric element?
  - compumike 12y ago
    Works great with gas & electric stovetops, both resistive coils or flat-top glass. (But not inductive at the moment.) 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRwQgvod2t4
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  IoT idea that I would buy: 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.
nrau 12y ago
I completely agree with the author here, far too much weight has been placed on the smartphone as the control device and UI for everything. 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.
HorizonXP 12y ago
This article was a great summarization of the problems we face in our startup. 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.
bbcbasic 12y ago
I have a really great UX for controlling lighting in my home. So simple my 2 year old understood it when she was just 12 months. 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.
- twald 12y ago
  You can't be possibly talking about a light switch, right? :) That's exactly what I'm talking about. I want something as simple as a light switch to control the colors of my lifx, Hue or control my sonos speakers.
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    You need a light bulb that listens to you. "LIFX BLUE PLEASE!!" you yell, and so it is.
    - uptown 12y ago
      I prefer: "Aziz! Light!"
  - jpindar 12y ago
    http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/the-range/hue-tap/ http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/the-range/hue-tap/
    - bbcbasic 12y ago
      This is literally a toy.
krohling 12y ago
I noticed a lot of these comments ended up referencing challenges with lighting so I figured it would be good to chime in here (caveat: co-founder @ emberlight.co). 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 We're actively researching many of these and building some very cool partnerships in this space for exactly this reason. I think the end result will end up being some combination of these models and perhaps others that I've missed. Btw, feel free to reach out directly for thoughts/questions/coffee: kevinr@emberlight.co
shmerl 12y ago
Is it just me? I find the term "smartphone" to be rather dumb. I prefer to call them handset computers.
pbreit 12y ago
I found myself in agreement with the post but then when I saw the flow it looked far too general purpose. And as a computer input device it looks like a nonstarter (sorta like leap). I was envisioning some very specific tasks.
dicroce 12y ago
It's 2014 (almost 2015). It's time my house knows to turn the hallway light on FOR me because it's night time and I'm walking in that direction.
- lucaspiller 12y ago
  Using a system like Z-Wave you can already do this. The problem is that as you need a lighting controller, multiple motion sensors and a base station it's not cheap - mainly due to licensing fees.
  - VLM 12y ago
    "mainly due to licensing fees." 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.
deleted 12y ago
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crazypyro 12y ago
I will say that I think Leap motion[0] is another really well made "controller" that would be great for smart homes. It just "works" with their code out of the box. You can easily tell how many fingers someone has, whether they are tapping, grabbing, a couple other gestures, their 3 dim location relative to the camera, etc. I used one at a hackathon a few months back to attempt a Theremin and it was quite fun. [0]https://www.leapmotion.com/ https://www.leapmotion.com/
- prawn 12y ago
  Interesting idea applying that to homes. Instead of the device watching/scanning out from a monitor to a keyboard surface, it could be a panel on a wall in your kitchen that recognises gestures performed nearby (like in the cubic foot in front of it). 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.
coldtea 12y ago
>Smart homes are not a thing of the future anymore. Right now, 100 “things” per second are connecting to the internet. By 2020, more than 250 things will connect each second. 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.
- vitaflo 12y ago
  Depends how you phrase the question. Do I want a water sensor by my sump pump that will alert me if it overflows? Yes. Do I want to have my garage door close automatically if I forget to close it? Yeah that makes me feel safer. Do I want to be able to set the thermostat when I'm not at home? Yeah, that's handy. 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.
- deleted 12y ago
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- prawn 12y ago
  I think the meh comes from poor implementation. I have LIFX globes I can control with my phone but they're a pain - takes too long to open my phone, open the app, wait for it to connect, etc. 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.
dangrossman 12y ago
Instead of a $99 custom button, what about a sub-$99 Android tablet? You can put them anywhere you'd put the button, and leave your home control app running with the screen set to never turn off. Turning on/off a light with a touch will then be no more effort than flicking a light switch -- there's nothing to take out of your pocket, no waiting for an app to open. 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 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 http://i.imgur.com/DUWIwh3.png
- markbao 12y ago
  This is really awesome and a good example of a cheap Android device as glass for software (what a world). Do you just have it instant-on when you push the power button? What about having it automatically wake up when you pick it up? (Since yours is a web-app, it might require you to use something like Tasker to do it.)
  - dangrossman 12y ago
    I mounted the tablets on walls with $10 kits from Amazon that use those 3M removable strips to hold the mounts, and drilled small holes for charging cords. I have the screens set to never turn off, and leave the browser open. So all the buttons are always just there on the wall, ready to be pressed. Nothing needs to wake up first. 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.
    - markbao 12y ago
      Hah, that's amazing. Great solution. If I had a house, I'd put together something like that, but with a Qi wireless charger with the magnet holding it up (hopefully strong enough). Still waiting for home automation widgets to come down in price so I have an excuse to install a lot of them in my apartment.
julianpye 12y ago
NFC would be a great intermediate solution to address this problem. Here's hoping that at the next WWDC, Apple will open up their NXP chip to everyone.
andars 12y ago
I feel like I must be missing something about the concept of a "smart home". Why can't I just leave the light switch (or any other controller) how it is and just have an additional Internet-based fancy control for automation or use when I am away from home? I don't see the need for any new control interfaces for things I can already control perfectly well.
dasil003 12y ago
Well, I don't think anyone ever said smartphone cameras were better than point and shoot from any UX aspect, but that hasn't stopped them from winning.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  It turned out "ever present" was the most important UX aspect.
shurcooL 12y ago
Smartphones are not a good way to control things in the real world because there's no tactile feedback. So the only feedback is on the screen, which you have to look at, instead of the real world thing you're controlling.
icegreentea 12y ago
I think its perfectly expect-able that an actual smart home be accessible through a variety of modalities and methods. There's no reason why there shouldn't be smartphone access. But there's also no reason why there shouldn't also be the ability to use voice commands (not through your smartphone), direct wall controls, 'dumb' (relatively) physical remotes, etc etc. 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.

86 points by jansen 12y ago

jsnk 12y ago

"We believe that the future of smart homes will not be found in a centralized device but in an integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces." 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.

twald 12y ago
Hey, one of the founders here. When we talk about integrated, we're talking about sensors integrated in the materials like tables and walls around us. It does not mean that all of these components should be integrated in one device. I did not phrase this well enough. Thanks! 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?
- VLM 12y ago
  "I personally don't want to carry my smartphone around all the time though" 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.
jat850 12y ago
I'm a little torn on this article, and even on your comment. I think the clock example you pick out is important. 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.

blacksmith_tb 12y ago

Well, sure, bad interfaces to 'smart home' devices will be unpleasant to use. But most things like Wemo, Hue, etc. still let you hit their wall switch. Their 'smartness' is additive, if you have a screen to control them with. 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.

twald 12y ago
I agree. And that's exactly one of the big changes that are happening. Prices for hardware components and manufacturing are dropping and we now have the ability to think about more suitable interfaces. I stopped using my lifx after a week because I did not have a fast and simple interface to control them.

PinguTS 12y ago

What I am missing with all the smart home thing and only the Nest has done right is, that the smartphone is a personal thing. But switch on a light or similar is not a personal thing, if you are living with a family with kids. In particular if you have smaller kids, which don't have a small device and must be able to switch on the light or similar. 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.

k__ 12y ago
Also, stuff like light doesn't need explicit interaction most of the time. 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.

scrumper 12y ago

I agree with the author's thesis, that smartphones, as generic information processing tools, offer poor user interfaces for controlling things in our physical environment. 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.)

seltzered_ 12y ago

You didn't mention the smartwatch at all in your essay. As someone living with one (a pebble) daily for the past year, many of the smarthome needs have been extending into working with the smartwatch, and they don't have the painpoints you describe. 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.

twald 12y ago
You're right. I'm going to talk about them in particular in a follow up post. I wear a pebble as well and I used to use it to control volume. I see smartwatches taking a big place in smart homes. Our issues were that they were not a shared control, you still had to use vision as your primary sensor input, battery life, screen size and problems with connectivity. But I'm confident some of these issues will be resolved soon.
- erohead 12y ago
  I like the idea of all of these things working together (phone, Pebble, Flow) to enable people to control their devices with whatever is available.
  - seltzered_ 12y ago
    Yep. I'm really seeing a near-term future of using a touchpad or kinect-like device for control, but more importantly paired with the smartwatch for vibration feedback / engaging into a gesture mode. There's no hard rule that a watch has to only connect to a smartphone. And if you look at the Apple's acquisition of Primesense (kinect-sensor folks) and upcoming introduction of 'Taptics' into the Apple Watch, my guess is that these things will work together. I've been trying to prototype this as an experimental addon to my touch plugin thimbleup.com (and sure, I'd love to eventually make it work with Senic Flow too). Testers have noted making continuous gestures/controls need a bit of 'stickiness' to it -- something that makes the gesture feel that if you use it enough, you don't have to rely solely on your eyes. A smartwatch takes care of that if it can manage the battery-life of being a low-latency bluetooth mode to get feedback data quickly,

joeframbach 12y ago

I have my previous-generation phone that I don't use anymore, plugged in, connected to wifi, on a shelf. It's an integrated combination of screens, speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces, and solves the multi-user issue because it's out in the open on a shelf, and it's not my personal device anymore so I don't have sensitive information on it. The apps are right on the home screen, no passcode, just a direct-to-the-app experience. You can find a used nexus one, or a moto e, for example, on Swappa for less than $100.

untog 12y ago

Smartphone controlled anything never feels great to me. If I have to type in code to unlock my keypad, then wait for an app to launch, just to change the temperature on the thermostat, it's already over. 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.

pbreit 12y ago
I think actually you need both. The Amazon fire tv's remote is critical but I miss not being able to cast from a phone.
seivan 12y ago
So much wrong with your statement... 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 :)
- lelandbatey 12y ago
  And yet all of those actions pale in comparison to just picking up a remote with nice tactile buttons and using it immediately, no weird navigation, no apps, nothing. I mean, I'd still use my smartphone as a remote for other reasons. But the parent does make a good point.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    So, instead of the phone (which for most people is always with you), have an extra task-specific remote, to feed with batteries, lose, and go fetch from another room when you need it. Plus "nice tactile buttons"? 2005 called. Of all the things one would need those for, setting a thermostat (which takes like 5 seconds) is very low in utility...

compumike 12y ago

The connected lightbulb example is great. That's IoT as a novelty; it adds few/trivial new capabilities, and it adds a lot of inconvenience. 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/ 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.

scott_karana 12y ago
Your Kickstarter campaign appears to only show gas burners. Is your pan useless with an electric element?
- compumike 12y ago
  Works great with gas & electric stovetops, both resistive coils or flat-top glass. (But not inductive at the moment.) 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRwQgvod2t4
bbcbasic 12y ago
IoT idea that I would buy: 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.

nrau 12y ago

I completely agree with the author here, far too much weight has been placed on the smartphone as the control device and UI for everything. 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.

HorizonXP 12y ago

This article was a great summarization of the problems we face in our startup. 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.

bbcbasic 12y ago

I have a really great UX for controlling lighting in my home. So simple my 2 year old understood it when she was just 12 months. 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.

twald 12y ago
You can't be possibly talking about a light switch, right? :) That's exactly what I'm talking about. I want something as simple as a light switch to control the colors of my lifx, Hue or control my sonos speakers.
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  You need a light bulb that listens to you. "LIFX BLUE PLEASE!!" you yell, and so it is.
  - uptown 12y ago
    I prefer: "Aziz! Light!"
- jpindar 12y ago
  http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/the-range/hue-tap/ http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/the-range/hue-tap/
  - bbcbasic 12y ago
    This is literally a toy.

krohling 12y ago

I noticed a lot of these comments ended up referencing challenges with lighting so I figured it would be good to chime in here (caveat: co-founder @ emberlight.co). 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 We're actively researching many of these and building some very cool partnerships in this space for exactly this reason. I think the end result will end up being some combination of these models and perhaps others that I've missed. Btw, feel free to reach out directly for thoughts/questions/coffee: kevinr@emberlight.co

shmerl 12y ago

Is it just me? I find the term "smartphone" to be rather dumb. I prefer to call them handset computers.

pbreit 12y ago

I found myself in agreement with the post but then when I saw the flow it looked far too general purpose. And as a computer input device it looks like a nonstarter (sorta like leap). I was envisioning some very specific tasks.

dicroce 12y ago

It's 2014 (almost 2015). It's time my house knows to turn the hallway light on FOR me because it's night time and I'm walking in that direction.

lucaspiller 12y ago
Using a system like Z-Wave you can already do this. The problem is that as you need a lighting controller, multiple motion sensors and a base station it's not cheap - mainly due to licensing fees.
- VLM 12y ago
  "mainly due to licensing fees." 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.

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crazypyro 12y ago

I will say that I think Leap motion[0] is another really well made "controller" that would be great for smart homes. It just "works" with their code out of the box. You can easily tell how many fingers someone has, whether they are tapping, grabbing, a couple other gestures, their 3 dim location relative to the camera, etc. I used one at a hackathon a few months back to attempt a Theremin and it was quite fun. [0]https://www.leapmotion.com/ https://www.leapmotion.com/

prawn 12y ago
Interesting idea applying that to homes. Instead of the device watching/scanning out from a monitor to a keyboard surface, it could be a panel on a wall in your kitchen that recognises gestures performed nearby (like in the cubic foot in front of it). 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.

coldtea 12y ago

>Smart homes are not a thing of the future anymore. Right now, 100 “things” per second are connecting to the internet. By 2020, more than 250 things will connect each second. 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.

vitaflo 12y ago
Depends how you phrase the question. Do I want a water sensor by my sump pump that will alert me if it overflows? Yes. Do I want to have my garage door close automatically if I forget to close it? Yeah that makes me feel safer. Do I want to be able to set the thermostat when I'm not at home? Yeah, that's handy. 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.
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prawn 12y ago
I think the meh comes from poor implementation. I have LIFX globes I can control with my phone but they're a pain - takes too long to open my phone, open the app, wait for it to connect, etc. 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.

dangrossman 12y ago

Instead of a $99 custom button, what about a sub-$99 Android tablet? You can put them anywhere you'd put the button, and leave your home control app running with the screen set to never turn off. Turning on/off a light with a touch will then be no more effort than flicking a light switch -- there's nothing to take out of your pocket, no waiting for an app to open. 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 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 http://i.imgur.com/DUWIwh3.png

markbao 12y ago
This is really awesome and a good example of a cheap Android device as glass for software (what a world). Do you just have it instant-on when you push the power button? What about having it automatically wake up when you pick it up? (Since yours is a web-app, it might require you to use something like Tasker to do it.)
- dangrossman 12y ago
  I mounted the tablets on walls with $10 kits from Amazon that use those 3M removable strips to hold the mounts, and drilled small holes for charging cords. I have the screens set to never turn off, and leave the browser open. So all the buttons are always just there on the wall, ready to be pressed. Nothing needs to wake up first. 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.
  - markbao 12y ago
    Hah, that's amazing. Great solution. If I had a house, I'd put together something like that, but with a Qi wireless charger with the magnet holding it up (hopefully strong enough). Still waiting for home automation widgets to come down in price so I have an excuse to install a lot of them in my apartment.

julianpye 12y ago

NFC would be a great intermediate solution to address this problem. Here's hoping that at the next WWDC, Apple will open up their NXP chip to everyone.

andars 12y ago

I feel like I must be missing something about the concept of a "smart home". Why can't I just leave the light switch (or any other controller) how it is and just have an additional Internet-based fancy control for automation or use when I am away from home? I don't see the need for any new control interfaces for things I can already control perfectly well.

dasil003 12y ago

Well, I don't think anyone ever said smartphone cameras were better than point and shoot from any UX aspect, but that hasn't stopped them from winning.

dllthomas 12y ago
It turned out "ever present" was the most important UX aspect.

shurcooL 12y ago

Smartphones are not a good way to control things in the real world because there's no tactile feedback. So the only feedback is on the screen, which you have to look at, instead of the real world thing you're controlling.

icegreentea 12y ago

I think its perfectly expect-able that an actual smart home be accessible through a variety of modalities and methods. There's no reason why there shouldn't be smartphone access. But there's also no reason why there shouldn't also be the ability to use voice commands (not through your smartphone), direct wall controls, 'dumb' (relatively) physical remotes, etc etc. 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.