So that’s how it’s supposed to work: In the future, people will no longer take the plane for a business trip from Berlin to Paris. The car is much more comfortable. Not a normal car of course. A car as Maurice Conti imagines it. Conti is a designer and works at Alpha, the innovation unit of the telecommunications group Telefónica. Conti’s car drives itself, of course, and it’s an office when the business traveler gets into the vehicle, “with the same environment you have in the office.”
When the working day is over, the office on wheels can be transformed into a cinema, of course with Imax quality and super-duper all-round sound. After a night at the movies, the seats flatten themselves and the traveler can go to sleep. The next morning she is well rested in front of her hotel in Paris, where she can take a shower. Because Conti said nothing about that.
But even so, there are enough counter-arguments against Conti’s vision, which he gave at a talk about the future with the boss of the electronics group LG, IP Park. Another podium participant, Ralph Wiegmann from the international Forum Design, formulated what was perhaps the most important. Anyone who uses services like this kind of car gives the technology a lot of responsibility, “you have to build a lot of trust for that.” However, Wiegmann sees the danger that people will be left behind on this journey. Companies may fantasize about a “home on wheels,” as LG boss Park called it. “Home is just a feeling, it can be anywhere,” he believes.
So that everything works together with everything else, so that – another idea from Conti – the refrigerator can tell the new robotic vacuum cleaner what the apartment is like, it first has to know. But why this is something that concerns a refrigerator at all, this question was not answered. It all seems a bit like that, so companies were desperate for use cases for techniques they were developing.
A networked house registers how its occupants behave
Today’s smart homes are not really smart anyway, says Andreas Bös from Conrad Connect, one spin off of electronics retailer Conrad: “False hopes are often raised.” What is available today is usually only networked, but not smart. Because “to do that, you first have to understand the data”.
It can look like this: A networked house registers how its occupants behave. When do you get up, when are you in the kitchen, when in the living room, when does the TV go on, when is the light in the bathroom? When the homeowners are on vacation, the house simulates the presence of the residents better than just a floor lamp in the living room with a timer.
Such systems, learning from their users, could solve one of the biggest problems facing smart homes: simplifying their control. What’s the point if only the engineer in the house knows how the system works, while everyone else stands there with their smartphones in their hands and doesn’t know how to proceed. If it’s just the light they can’t get on, it’s less of a problem, but if you can’t get in the door, things start to get serious.
The accumulation of data does not create a second problem, but it does increase it: the data relates to the private environment, and one actually wants to give as little as possible of it to some company, from which one ultimately does not know exactly what they do with it set up. A technician in the data center only has to flip the wrong switch and the data can be called up online by everyone. Such breakdowns happen again and again. Users must also trust that the devices are also secured against intrusion from outside. There have been enough cases like this in recent times. Surveillance cameras – of all things! – as a gateway for hackers, that actually existed, millions of devices were hijacked and misused for attacks on Internet services.
The most common systems used are ones in which the light can be switched on by speaking
The fact that the networked home is still not a real hit despite the industry’s drumming for years is due to precisely these two factors. No normal user wants – firstly – to bring more complexity into the house, they want it to be more convenient, possibly also safer and perhaps also more energy-efficient, for example if the heating thinks for itself and the system is turned down when nobody is in the house.
Second, how much risk are users willing to take to have their house tell them, “Don’t you want to close the window on the west side, there’s supposed to be a thunderstorm today”? It’s very private data that doesn’t concern anyone. The providers promise to keep the data safe, but something can always go wrong and it often does.
The fact that the corporations behind the voice-controlled assistants Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and Co. have had people check what the users of their services actually want from the machines is also an issue for many. They believed they only communicated with machines. But in order to improve the services, of course people have to get involved. After all, every third German is said to have already used such an assistant, how many live in a really smart house is difficult to define, because an Alexa does not make a house smart. Most commonly used are systems where you can turn on the light by speaking. The data that is disclosed is manageable, the effect visible in the literal sense.
Networked audio systems are also in demand, “hardly any audio systems with cables are available anymore,” says Michael Mauser, head of global day-to-day business at sound specialist Harman. The technology now offers enough capacity to also transmit audio of the highest quality wirelessly. And the same applies here: “The smartphone is the remote control”.
