NextGen Home Tour
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted January 11th 2007 9:29PM
posted January 11th 2007 9:29PM
After hearing about Best Buy's ConnectedLife.Home we wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so we headed over to the NextGen Home Experience. This home was a gadget lovers dream with every appliance in the house connected and all accessible via touch panels throughout the house. While we were very impressed with this level of home automation, $6,999 for a 12.1 touch panel seems a bit wacked.
The best part of the whole thing is the faucet that slides into the counter. Other than that, a bunch of LCDs and XP Media Center & what seems like basic home automation is hardly Next Gen.
Oh good; it appears that the Next-Gen home is portable too...
Screw the gadgets I just want aerogel in my walls and ceilings!
for $7k they better be introducing a new naming convention similar to speakers, 12.1 has to mean 12 smaller satellite screens and 1 main. seven thousand, absurd.
I must say, that home automation system blows ... and is waaaay overpriced. My HA system is much better and cost under $2k. It is run by a Hack-a-Mack Mini Core 2 Duo, sends IR signals to the HT system via wifi, and controls interior and exterior lighting throughout the house. Also, the system can be accessed from anywhere because it is all html driven.
Check out the iinterface:
http://www.123macmini.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10237
How about some writeup on the house? Interesting and all to see the pictures -- but I'm just looking at what appears to be a switch in one shot, cords in another, a rack that says "67" in a third and finally a 42" HDTV.
If I ever become surrounded by that much technology please shoot me in the forehead.
Thanks.
I agree with Nikita. There's only so much technology you need around the home.
The next gen home is a double wide packed with way too many expensive flat screens on layaway or a credit card?
The next gen home is in pretty much every trailer park in America.
I've heard of skeletons in a closet, but never in a kitchen...
This is a good example of marketing making tech purchases, not tech experts. Technology in a home should be reliable/tough, simple ,and easy to maintain. All of which $7k touch-screens are not.
That has to be one of the worst Automation installs I have ever seen. Why waste it on a double wide, if you can afford all the tech, try upgrading the house first.
i work with computers all day long- i go home to get away from computers if im not about to sit at home in my project recording studio staring at a computer or playing some classic ghost recon on xbox in front of my 40inch tv- im already enamoured by too much technology...that house would look good in a handbasket headed for hell- its a joke.
Maybe they used a double-wide because the home is mobile, for trade shows and such.
Maybe Engadget could hire a real photographer.
Life|Ware is a great looking product, too bad it costs more than Gates left arm.
And, in closing, the house is basically the same as CES2006, not next-gen at all. But with next-gen pricing.
now all you need is a trust fund to pay your electric bill each month. Turtle Power!
What a load of rubbish - this isn't NextGen, that’s just using MediaCenter and some other blue background software and what looks like miles of Ethernet cable - they could have pretended to use wi-fi! Ethernet is soo impractical for this sort of thing – i.e. one wire back to a hub for every component (including lights!) Talking of lights I wonder how long it takes to walk into your lounge scrabble to find the remote (in the dark) which is a pain most of the time then scroll through the menu trying to find the correct light to switch on! Oh and don't get me started on using MS Operating systems for running something mildly important (Reliability and Security)!
Couple of to note about the house -
The touch panels can render 720p hi def video and there are no other touch panels that can do that. They are also an installer-only product. Maybe not for you, but my understanding is the demand is greater then availability right now.
The light switches were all wireless Z-wave lights. They also had a UMPC working as a wireless automation controller. I agree the house was packed with a ton of extra tech, but the actors did a good job explaining how'd they use the gear in their everyday lives. Also, the whole house was run on Vista Media Center, not XP. I guess it's easy to slam the houe if you didn't go through it...
First off I don't see how this is next gen, when I think of a next gen house I think of that house they used to have that was built before microwave ovens were invented that had an oven in the kitchen that cooked food in minutes(now we call it a microwave oven) and had something like the PC. It predicted what was coming not just taking a ton of money and installing high end equipment in a dumpy house. If you want to see this just watch TV, I've seen some of this home automation on a practical level integrated nicely into some homes on some of those home improvement shows.
Also any next gen house should be completely green powered, so it should have some sort of solar power management system built in.
Fine if you want to build something like this for marketing but it needs a better name like "Obnoxious High Tech House"
"A bit wacked" is that a technical term? Did you learn that in journalism school? Speaking of school, where did your photographer go? The quality of pictures was horrible. Here's a hint, when taking a picture of a screen, close the shades to get rid of the glare. The technology itself looks pretty sweet and this is coming from a person who was actually at CES and walked through the house. For all those who had a problem with the house being a trailer, I would like to know what type of house should be built FOR A TRADE SHOW.