No matter to what level consumer technologies and appliances be new to a market, they have always been accepted for good reasons. By definition and intention, consumer technologies are constantly augmented to simplify our routine habits and requirements. Pointing specifically at the household appliances, you may introduce new devices and setups to your current home eco-system to make it smarter than ever. But there has always been a much wider room to enhance your abode. Much of the menial tasks at home can be automated.
Microsoft’s Home Operating System research is about pushing the home eco-system management to a broader level. Of course, refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, air conditioners, etceteras, are the most common home applications that automate a good deal of manual work. But consider a time when you are not home and you have a set of activities to perform, which can only be achieved in your presence. Or may be a point where you need to perform a step-by-step list of activities that require physical presence just to tip-tap buttons and get the machines working (television, set-top boxes, lamps and so on). This is where HomeOS steps in to organize the menial tasks into one place and conveniently control, like as easily from a smart phone.
A student demonstrating how to turn on and off lights via gestures with a Kinect (an excerpt from the white paper)
With HomeOS, you can add remote surveillance for security and monitor the energy consumption at your home. All and more of these capabilities will be available and setup through the HomeStore gateway installed on the user’s computer. The user can accordingly add more functionalities to the home system from the HomeStore. According a video shared by one of the contributors of this research, the add-on like functionalities in HomeOS are coded in C# language.
In the following video, Ratul Mahajan (one of the contributors to this project) demonstrates how the HomeOS system would work on a very basic scale.
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