Today's vision of a smart home has
more to do with what's technologically possible than what people really need.
Thus the endless parade of
internet-connected wine openers, water bottles, meat thermometers and
refrigerators, and a dearth of automation that would clean and fold our laundry,
pick up things around the house or assist aging people as their physical
strength wanes.
Not that some tinkerers aren't
trying to come up with life-changing tools. The annual CES gadget show, which
opened in Las Vegas on Tuesday, is a showcase of the latest innovations from
big corporations and tiny startups. Some of these inventions could soon be
useful to consumers. Others look outlandishly impractical - or maybe it's too
soon to tell.
The Internet Of What?
Want to book an Uber ride from
your fridge? Samsung has you covered with one of its latest refrigerator models
unveiled in Vegas. Of if you're looking for a water bottle that "helps
celebrate when you've met your hydration goals," the internet-connected
Hidrate Spark 2.0 has arrived.
You can command a Whirlpool
microwave to switch settings with your voice, but per regulations, you still
have to walk over to push the button to start it (and of course put food in and
out). A meat thermometer made by Apption Labs will send a notification to your
phone app when your steak is fully barbecued.
It's unlikely that anyone but the
most extreme wine connoisseur will need to track wine-preserving argon gas
levels in a half-finished bottle of pinot noir. But a maker of bottle-opening
gadgetry, Coravin, lets you do just that. The device needles wine out of a
bottle without pulling the cork. What's new is connectivity and an app, so
you're alerted when the gadget needs cleaning or a new battery.
All this reflects a cottage
industry striving to imbue every last household appliance or wearable item with
connectivity. But do we really need it?
Never mind the naysayers
What one person considers a silly
idea is another person's breakthrough, and many innovations displayed at CES
could find long-term commercial success among niche audiences even if they
aren't widely adopted, said technology analyst Tom Coughlin, president of
Coughlin Associates.
"Some stuff is before it's time. Some stuff is
partially thought through," Coughlin said. But you never know, he said,
because "sometimes people don't know what they need until they see it."
At CES, Coughlin said, "you
see the hopes and dreams, the fantasies, both mad and sublime and clever things
that people can think of doing."
The Dutch lesson
In the Netherlands, startup
entrepreneurs often look mockingly back to a late-1990s video that asked random
people in Amsterdam if they ever wanted a mobile phone, said Stefan Witkamp,
co-founder of smart home startup Athom B.V.
"Now it's unthinkable not to have your
smartphone," said Witkamp, whose company's Homey product links various
connected devices to a single system. Similar scepticism now affects smart
devices, he said.
"People think, why do I need to control my music
through my smartphone? Why do I need to manage and monitor my home remotely or
automatically? But it could very well be that in five years, we'll be thinking:
'Why would we ever not want to?'"
But where's my robot?
The reality is that it's a lot
easier to connect an appliance to the internet than it is to build
"Rosie," the robotic maid that TV cartoon show "The
Jetsons" launched into the world's imagination a half-century ago.
Sure, robotic vacuums are already
cleaning carpets and kitchen floors around the world, but the level of
artificial intelligence and physical precision it takes to do housework like a
human is still a far-off dream for robot-makers. Instead, many of the robots
coming on the consumer market are either toys or designed to be a more
personality-driven version of a talking speaker.
But it's not for lack of trying.
Duelling laundry-folders
"It took us 13 years to reach this point,"
said Shin Sakane, founder and CEO of Tokyo-based Seven Dreamers Laboratories.
His "Laundroid"
clothes-folder - and the rival FoldiMate also on display at CES - are feats of
engineering that also underscore the limits of current technology. Sakane's
bureau-sized machine is powered by hidden robotic arms and computer vision that
can distinguish between different types of clothing. "It's a soft
material," Sakane said, clutching a white towel. "It could be a
T-shirt. It's hard to distinguish."
Priced at $16,000, the machine can
take 30 items per cycle, though it's still not terribly efficient. It takes 10
or more minutes to fold a shirt - making each cycle a 6-hour project.
Rival FoldiMate claims to be
faster, but the company came to the show for the second-year running without a
functioning prototype. As founder and CEO Gal Rosov demonstrated putting shirts
and towels into a top rack where they were sucked into the machine, a bottom
drawer opened with pre-folded items inside. To repeat the display, he opened a
middle panel where crumpled items hadn't been folded at all.
Rosov said the machine on display
was just a concept model and the company hopes to start "early
shipping" at the end of 2019.
