This covers areas like Home Automation ("Smart Home", etc) and
Ubiquitous computing.
The Ubiquitous computing home page is at
http://sandbox.xerox.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html
For something a little more dreamy describing a possible future home,
check out Mark Weiser's "Open House" ...
http://www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~review/current/focus2/open00.html
which talks about dwelling with, not interacting with, computers music
in the morning indicates coming appointments glowing trails of who has
walked by the window ... how realistic is this?
One interesting current project can be found at
http://www.optera.com/smarthome/
... a WWW document about a "smart" home: the owner of the house is
building it & documenting what he does. He is also the owner, founder,
and sole employee of a company that specializes in this :). He's
trying to do as much as possible as cheaply as possible.
This Article in Upside describes the state of the art in smart homes:
http://www.upside.com/current/homeauto.html
One protocol that is really driving current stuff is X10. Below is an
excerpt from the FAQ. Other people are developing other (and probably
better) standards, but X10 is already there, it works without an
re-wiring of the home, and people are using it ...
X10: excerpt from the FAQ:
Q101. What is X10?
X10 is a communications protocol for remote control of electrical devices.
It is designed for communications between X10 transmitters and X10
receivers which communicate on standard household wiring. Transmitters and
receivers generally plug into standard electrical outlets although some
must be hardwired into electrical boxes. Transmitters send commands such
as "turn on", "turn off" or "dim" preceded by the identification of the
receiver unit to be controlled. This broadcast goes out over the
electrical wiring in a building. Each receiver is set to a certain unit
ID, and reacts only to commands addressed to it. Receivers ignore commands
not addressed to them.
Q102. What sort of X10 transmitters exist?
The simplest X10 transmitter is a small control box with buttons. The
buttons select which unit is to be controlled, and which control function
is to be sent to the selected units (e.g. "turn on", "all units off", etc).
There are also clock timer transmitters which can be programmed to send X10
commands at certain times. Some of these can be programmed with buttons on
the timer; some must be connected to a computer to select the times. There
are other special purpose transmitters that send certain X10 commands at
sunup or sundown, upon detecting movement, or as commanded by tones over a
telephone. This is not an all inclusive list, and more detail on specific
transmitters is given in Section 2.
Q103. What sort of X10 receivers exist?
The simplest X10 receiver is a small module with an electrical plug (to
connect to a standard wall outlet), an electrical outlet (to provide
controlled power to the device it's controlling) and two dials (to set the
unit ID code) on it. An appliance module has relay inside which switches
power to its outlet on or off in response to X10 commands directed to it. A
lamp module is similar, but has a triac instead of a relay and will respond
to dimming commands as well as on or off commands. Other receivers can be
wired into wall outlets or into lamp fixtures. Note that the standard wall
switch (X10:WS467) is a receiver, not a transmitter; it does not transmit
X10 commands, and only takes action when it receives the appropriate X10
command or local button-push.