We tell you throughout this topic to think about the big picture — to think about more than just networking your home computers. In next topic, we talk about adding various peripheral devices (such as a printer) to your home network. In further topic, we talk about using newfangled phone gear over wireless networks. In next topic, you hear about lots of things you can connect today, ranging from cameras to cars.
Clearly, the boom is on among the consumer goods manufacturers to wirelessly network enable everything with wireless processing chips. You get the convenience (and cool factor) of monitoring the health of your gadgets, and vendors want to sell you add-on services to take advantage of that wireless chip. This transformation is happening to everything: clocks, sewing machines, automobiles, toaster ovens — even shoes. If a device can be added to your wireless home network, value-added services can be sold to those who want to track their kids, listen to home-stored music in the car, and know when Fido is in the neighbor’s garbage cans again.
In this topic, we expose you to some things that you could bring to your wireless home network soon. Many of these products already exist. Expect in coming years that they will infiltrate your home. Like the Borg says on Star Trek, "Prepare to be assimilated."
Your Bathtub
Yup, wireless toys are everywhere now, having traversed their way into the innermost sanctuary of your home: the bathroom. We’re not talking Psycho-type shots of people in the shower — we’re interested in how to get audio, video, and data into the bathroom so that you can enjoy your privacy even more than you do today.
Not too many homes are wired for computer and video in the bathroom. (We’ve even seen a creative retrofit solution from Google, jokingly launched on April Fools Day — the Google TiSP service, www.google.com/tisp/index.html). Wireless may be the only way to get signals — like a phone signal — to some of these places. We have seen wireless-enabled toilets (don’t ask) and all sorts of wireless controls for lighting in the bathroom to create just the right atmosphere for that bath.
It’s the wireless enablement of the bathtub itself that gets us excited. Luxury bathing combined with a home entertainment bathing center in one outfitted bathroom set is probably the ultimate for a wireless enthusiast.
Jacuzzi (www.jacuzzi.com) is the leader in this foray. They have 42-inch plasma TVs in hot tubs and LCDs in the shower. These days, Jacuzzi sells the only wireless waterproof remote control (Aquasound) we’ve seen, but it’s what comes with the remote control that gets us. The Jacuzzi Affinity hot tub (Figure 19-1) comes standard with a built-in stereo/CD system, complete with four speakers as well as an integrated 9-inch television. The multichannel unit is waterproof and includes a remote control. Cable ready, this feature allows you to enjoy the morning news or your favorite movie. A digital control panel offers easy access to the whirlpool operation, underwater lighting, and temperature readout. Talk about wired! All these features cost a mere $12,919 retail, but you can find it for a street price of a mere $7,000 or so. Oh, and you get the hot tub part too — three fixed back jets per person and five fully directional jets around the perimeter.
The problem is that most homes aren’t wired for audio or video in their bathroom. That’s where your wireless home network comes into play. You can use the same wireless A/V extension devices used to link your PC and your stereo system to reach into the bathroom and bring your Affinity online.
Figure 19-1:
The Jacuzzi Affinity hot tub can add to your home’s I wireless entertainment.
You can also get wireless speakers designed for the humidity and temperatures found in the bathroom — note that they’re water resistant, not waterproof, so don’t expect to drop them in the water and have them work. You can, though, check out underwater speakers, like those from Lubell Labs (www.lubell.com).
You can creatively get wireless into your bathroom in other ways, but you have to be careful about humidity and exposing electronics directly to water. Check out what this bloke did in his bathroom: www.chasingparkedcars. com/bathroom/index.html. We think that there will be more and more retrofit electronics for the bathroom over time, making it easier to add a TV to your shower, for instance. The electronic technologies are changing too fast to embed them into devices such as showers that will be around for 20 years.
Your Car
In next topic, we discuss how cars are sporting Bluetooth interfaces to enable devices to interact with the car’s entertainment and communications systems. In further topic, we discuss the range of aftermarket devices you can buy now that provide 802.11-based connectivity between your home’s wireless LAN and your car, whenever it’s in range. (We guess that makes your garage a really big docking station!)
OnStar calling
Car manufacturers are sensing a business opportunity in providing connectivity to your car. Perhaps the most well-known service is OnStar (www.onstar.com), offered on a number of GM and other vehicles. OnStar offers emergency car services, such as the ones from the American Automobile Association (AAA), with GPS and two-way cellular communications thrown in. You can not only make cell phone calls with the system, but also get GM to unlock your car doors. It’s a factory-installed-only option, so you can’t get it if it’s not in your car when you bought it. You have to pay monthly service fees that start at $18.95 per month, or $199.00 per year. You can add turn-by-turn instructions for another $10.00 per month.
Other car manufacturers are following suit. BMW offers the similar BMW Assist, for example. We expect all car manufacturers to offer something similar within a few years — it makes too much sense. Check out some of the short movies on how OnStar has gotten people out of sticky situations at www.onstar.com/us_ english/jsp/idemo/index.jsp.
Because most cars already have a massive computing and entertainment infrastructure, reaching out and linking that infrastructure to both the Internet and your wireless home network is simply a no-brainer.
A wireless connection in the car enables you to talk to your car via your wireless network. Now, before you accuse us of having gone loony for talking to our car, think about whether your lights are still on. Wouldn’t it be great to check from your 40th-floor apartment rather than head all the way down to the parking garage? Just grab your 802.11g-enabled handheld computer, surf to your car’s own Web server, and check whether you left the lights on again. Or perhaps you’re filling out a new insurance form and forgot to check the mileage on your car. Click over to the dashboard page and see what it says.
You can also, on request, check out your car’s exact location based on GPS readings. (GPS is a location-finding system that effectively can tell you where something is, based on its ability to triangulate signals from three or more satellites that orbit the Earth. GPS can usually spot its target within 10-100 meters of the actual location.) You can, again at your request, even allow your dealer to check your car’s service status via the Internet. You can also switch on the lights or the auxiliary heating, for example, call up numbers in the car telephone or addresses in the navigation system, and unlock and lock the car — all from the wireless comfort of your couch. Just grab your wireless Web tablet, surf, and select. Pretty cool. The opportunities to wirelessly connect to your automobile are truly endless.
Your car could also talk to other cars. If all cars were interconnected, information could be daisy-chained from car to car, alerting users of obstructions in the road or braking ahead. (Of course, this would never be used to alert people that police speed traps are ahead!) Expect cars to become outfitted with at least a Wi-Fi bridge on board as a standard offering, driven in part by the increasing availability of Wi-Fi at the city level and at hotspots. The same capabilities that would allow a car to log into a citywide Wi-Fi network would also enable cars to establish peer-to-peer networks, communicating constantly. Once car-to-car communications are established, group viewing, talking, and listening can’t be too far away. That’ll make those college road trips to the beach more interesting!
Look for the following near-term applications for wirelessly linking your car to your home:
Vehicle monitoring systems: These devices — usually mounted under a seat, under the hood, or in the trunk — monitor the speed, acceleration, deceleration, and various other driving and engine performance variables so that you can determine whether your kids are racing down the street after they nicely drive out of your driveway. When your car is parked in your driveway, the information is automatically uploaded to your PC over your wireless home network.
Devices such as Davis Instruments Corporation’s DriveRight (www. davisnet.com, $375) and RoadSafety International’s RS-1000 Teen Driver System (www.roadsafety.com, $295) can link to your home’s network via any USB wireless client device.
E-commerce: It’s iTunes meets Wi-Fi — you hear a great new song on your radio. Maybe you didn’t catch the artist or song title. You push the Buy button on your audio system, which initiates a secure online transaction, and a legal copy of the song is purchased and downloaded to the car at the next wireless hot spot your car senses. From now on, you can listen to the song over and over again, just like you would with a CD. When you get home, you can upload it to your home’s audio system. Currently there are home HD Radio systems that can support this functionality with an attached iPod and the Apple iTunes Store — we expect that this functionality will move to the car before too long.
Remote control: Use remote controls for your car to automatically open minivan doors or turn on the lights before you get in. A remote car starter is a treat for anyone who lives in very hot or cold weather (get that heater going before you leave your home). Fancier remote controls, such as the AutoCommand Remote Starters and Security products from DesignTech International (www.designtech-intl.com, around $200), have a built-in car finder capability as well as a remote headlight control. AutoCommand can be programmed to automatically start your vehicle at the same time the next day, at a low temperature, or at a low battery voltage.
Okay, so these aren’t necessarily new and don’t require a wireless home network. But when you can use wireless networks to connect these devices to the rest of your home’s other systems, you can start experiencing a whole home network.When you utter "Start the car," the system communicates with the car and gets it into the right temperature setting — based on the present temperature outside (it gets its readings from its Davis Instruments backyard wireless weather station (www.davisnet.com/ weather/products/index.asp).
Look soon for neat combinations between car monitoring systems and the Bluetooth capabilities on cell phones to be able to distinguish which phones (and therefore which people) are traveling around in your car!
Your Home Appliances
Most attempts to converge the Internet and home appliances have been prototypes and concept products — a few products are on the market, but we would be less than honest if we said that the quantities being sold were anything but mass market yet. LGE (www.lge.com) was the first in the world to introduce the Internet refrigerator — a Home Network product with Internet access capability — back in June 2000 (see Figure 19-2). LGE soon introduced other Internet-based information appliance products in the washing machine, air conditioner, and microwave areas. The Internet refrigerator is outfitted with a 15-inch detachable LCD touch screen that serves as a TV monitor, computer screen, stereo, and digital camera all in one. You can call your refrigerator from your cell phone, PDA, or any Internet-enabled device.
LGE also has an Internet air conditioner that allows you to download programs into the device so that you can have preprogrammed cooling times, just like with your heating system setbacks. Talk to your digital home theater to preprogram something stored on your audio server to be playing when you get home. It’s all interrelated, by sharing a network in common. Wireless plays a part by enabling these devices to talk to one another in the home.
As of this writing, LGE sells a next-generation multimedia refrigerator (model LSC27991, $3,800) that is more like a TV that happens to have a refrigerator behind it. The refrigerator has two screens, one in each door, and is wire-lessly enabled for weather alerts (powered by Ambient Devices’ wireless alerting network technology; see the sidebar "The wireless orb knows all"). However, all TV and DVD connections are standard wired connections.
Figure 19-2:
The first LGE Internet refrigerator was wirelessly enabled.
Samsung (www.samsung.com/us/) has the RH269LBSH Digital Network Refrigerator, which is equipped with Internet access, a videophone, and a TV. In addition to storing food, consumers can send and receive e-mail, surf the Net, and watch a favorite DVD by using the refrigerator’s touchscreen control panel, which also serves as a detachable wireless-enabled handheld computer. Pretty neat.
All this is still pricey though — you may spend $4,000 or more on an Internet refrigerator. Sadly, due to this high cost and other reasons, these connected home appliances have not really taken off. The market demand has not been there for the all-in-one products — people still seem tied to their TVs and PC screens as separate from the appliances. Indeed, the latest moves by the consumer electronics and appliances industry seems more focused on making TVs more functional.
More wireless changes are coming too. With recent developments in radio frequency identification (RFID), Near Field Communications (NFC), and other low-power and low-priced technologies, you may indeed get to the point where your kitchen monitors all its appliances (and what’s in them — "We need more milk").
The wireless orb knows all
Ambient Devices (www.ambientdevices.com) offers wireless products that make tangible interfaces to digital information. This sounds broad, but so are their product offerings. They offer glowing orbs that change colors based on stock prices; umbrellas whose handles glow when it’s going to rain; weather displays that tell you, at a glance, what the weather is going to be for the next 7 days; even an "Energy Joule" that tells you the current price of electricity and your consumption at a specific outlet. The key to their ability to do this is their wireless network. All products tune into the wireless Ambient Information Network to receive broadcasted data. Our favorite product is the Ambient Orb, the colorful globe that we’ve programmed to tell us when we’ve sold more books on Amazon.com!
Your Entertainment Systems
In next topic we talk about ways you can connect your entertainment systems (your home theater, TV, and audio equipment) to your wireless network. Today that primarily means getting content from your PC and/or the Internet into those devices using media adapters that connect to your wireless network on one end and to your TV or audio gear on the other end.
In the not-so-distant future, however, you’ll be able to skip the extra gear because wireless will be built right into your audio/visual gear. Read on for some examples of how this will happen.
Wi-Fi networking will be built into receivers and TVs
Hewlett-Packard has released a Wi-Fi ready television. The HP MediaSmart TV (www.hp.com) is a high-definition LCD TV with wireless Ethernet capabilities on board. Through this television, you can access CinemaNow (www.cinema now.com) and Live365 (www.live365.com) to download movies and music instantly. You can also use an HP Snapfish account to store photos online and have them play directly on the TV anytime. Other TV vendors are rushing to offer Internet-connected TVs as well, with the ability in some cases to insert a CableCARD to supplant your cable TV box. Expect to see Internet connectivity to be standard soon in most higher-end TVs. As an interim step, Sony offers an external device called the DMX-NVI BRAVIA Internet Video Link (www.sony.com, $299). This device provides a mechanism to access a variety of Internet content on your shiny new BRAVIA LCD HDTV. We expect Sony to move this functionality into the TV eventually and to add a fast 802.11n wireless connection as well.
Other gear in your home theater is also going wireless. For instance, Denon (www.denon.com) has its AVR-4308CI Advanced 7.1 Channel Home Theater/ MultiMedia A/V Receiver with Ethernet networking and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi on board. The Wi-Fi not only gives you access to streaming media but also lets you log in remotely to your receiver.
802.11n, which we cover in detail in next topic, has been designed specifically to support multimedia networking among all the devices in the home. We expect to see this become standard in at least midrange and high-end A/V gear in the next few years.
Cables? Who needs them?
Another and quite different wireless change looming on the horizon is wireless cabling. You may not care much about wireless cabling until you put that 50-inch LCD on the wall and realize that there’s an HDMI cable coming down the wall — serious spousal issues on that one!
Wireless HDMI comes to the rescue. Wireless HDMI is exactly what it sounds like — a wireless high-definition multimedia interface that links your HDMI port on your TV to your HDMI output on your satellite box, A/V receiver, PS3, or whatever. Wireless HDMI is not a standard per se, but many early implementations are coming to market using ultra wideband (UWB) under the WiMedia standard. Early wireless HDMI chipsets can use the WiMedia UWB standard to deliver more than 300 Mbps of sustained throughput for in-room coverage. The theoretical maximum throughput of UWB is 480 Mbps. At this rate, Wireless HDMI will have to compress the HD signal.
A group of consumer electronics kingpins got together in 2005 to form the WirelessHD Consortium aimed at developing a noncompressed wireless standard for high-definition audio/video transmission. Instead of UWB, the WiHD standard uses the 60 GHz band to offer HD content without the need for compression. Instead of providing up to 300 Mbps using UWB, WiHD reportedly will transmit at 5 Gbps.
Wireless HDMI technologies will be available to consumers first. The first WiHD products will hit the market sometime in 2008. Gefen, for instance, has its Wireless HDMI Extender (www.gefen.com, $699), offering transmission of high-definition video (for you video geeks, the system supports up to 1080p at 30 fps, or 1080i at 60 fps, at distances up to 33 feet). Gefen does compress the signal, using lossy JPEG 2000 compression, and the resulting image quality will be less than that of wired HDMI. However, until there’s more experience with the product in the field (in different wireless environments), we won’t know how much is lost. For $699, we’re counting on it being minimal!
Other major brands are getting into the wireless HDMI business as well, and we’re expecting the current high prices to drop considerably over the next few years as we move along the chip volume production curve and as competing WiHD products come to market.
The wireless cable experience is not limited to HDMI though. We expect to see short-distance, high-capacity wireless technologies actually turn the mess of wires behind your stereo gear into a totally wireless network with logical configurations done on your browser or through your TV set. Want to connect your DVD player to your receiver? No problem; just configure the wireless ports on both machines to see each other and you’re done. We’re excited about this development, which we hope will happen in the next three to five years.
Your Musical Instruments
Band gear has been wireless for some time. You can get wireless mics, guitars, and other musical instruments. But what is new is the bevy of musical gear that is coming on the market, designed for hopping on your wireless LAN and making your life fun. We’re talking wireless band mayhem!
Guitar Hero (www.guitarhero.com, $90), the runaway success from Activision, jump-started this trend in our minds. A simple wireless guitar with buttons instead of strings allows even the most unmusically minded player to play with the best bands on Earth.
Rock Band (www.rockband.com, $170) takes it a step higher by taking the four key instruments one needs to make a band (guitar, bass, drums, vocals), and builds them into a highly playable (and addictive) game. Each person plays their respective role in the game, using their wireless instruments, and drums, strums, bangs, and yells their way into rock history. As we write, the first versions of this game are coming out for the latest gaming platforms, such as the PS3 and Xbox 360, but PC versions are expected as well. It’s only a matter of time before you are virtually playing with other players all over the globe via the Internet.
A wireless home backbone enables fast access to online music scores, such as those from www.score-on-line.com.
Other musical instruments are also growing more complex and wireless. With ConcertMaster, from Baldwin Piano (www.gibson.com/en-us/Divisions/Baldwin/), your wireless home LAN can plug into your ConcertMaster Mark Il-equipped Baldwin, Chickering, or Wurlitzer piano and play almost any musical piece you can imagine. You can plan an entire evening of music, from any combination of sources, to play in any order — all via a wireless RF remote control.
The internal ConcertMaster Library comes preloaded with 20 hours of performances in five musical categories, or you can create as many as 99 custom library categories to store your music. With as many as 99 songs in each category, you can conceivably have nearly 50,000 songs onboard and ready to play. Use your wireless access to your home’s Internet connection to download the latest operating system software from Baldwin’s servers. The system can accept any wireless MIDI interface. Encore!
You can record on this system too. A one-touch Quick-Record button lets you instantly save piano performances, such as your child’s piano recital. You can also use songs that you record and store on a CD or USB flash drive with your PC to use in editing, sequencing, and score notation programs.
Your Pets
GPS-based tracking services can be used for pets, too! Just about everyone can identify with having lost a pet at some point. The GPS device can be collar-based or a subdermal implant. This device can serve as your pet’s electronic ID tag; it also can serve as the basis for real-time feedback to the pet or its owner, and perhaps provide automatic notification if your dog goes out of the yard, for example.
Globalpetfinder.com is a typical example of a GPS-enabled system (www. globalpetfinder.com, $290). With this system, you create one or more circular virtual fences defined by a GPS location. Your home’s address, for example, is translated by its online site into a GPS coordinate, and you can create a fence that might be 100 feet in radius. If your pet wanders outside this fence, you’re alerted immediately and sent the continuously updated location of your pet to the two-way wireless device of your choice — cell phone, PDA, or computer, for example. You can find your pet by dialing the collar’s phone number, and it replies with the present location. If you’re using a PDA with a graphical interface, such as a Treo or Blackberry, you can see the location on a street map. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee for the service — to cover the cell costs — which ranges from $18 to $20 per month. If your dog runs away often, go for the Escape Artist Peace of Mind plan!
The 802.11 technologies are making their way into the pet-tracking arena as well. Several companies are testing prototypes of wireless clients that would log onto neighborhood Wi-Fi APs and send messages about their positions back to their owners. Although the coverage certainly isn’t as broad as cellular service, it certainly would be much less expensive. So your LAN may soon be part of a neighborhood wireless network infrastructure that provides a NAN — neighborhood area network — one of whose benefits is such continual tracking capability for pets.
Checking out new wireless gadgets
The merging of wireless and other consumer goods is a major economic trend. You can expect that you will have many more options in the future to improve your life (or ruin it) using Wi-Fi devices. Here are three great places to keep track of the latest and greatest in new wireless products:
Gizmodo (www.gizmodo.com): Gizmodo tracks all the leading-edge gadgets of any type. This site is fun to visit, just to see what someone has dreamed up. As we write this topic, there’s a neat story about glow-in-the-dark light bulbs that still provide luminescence after they’re turned off — that’s emergency lighting! For your wireless fancy, all sorts of articles on new wireless wares appear each week; just be prepared — many are available only in Asia. Rats!
Engadget (www.engadget.com): Engadget was founded by one of the major editors from Gizmodo. It largely mimics Gizmodo but with meatier posts and reader comments for many articles.
EHomeUpgrade (www.ehomeupgrade.com): EHomeUpgrade covers a broader spectrum of software, services, and even industry trends, but hardcore wireless is a mainstay of its fare as well.
You can’t go wrong checking these sites regularly to see what’s new to put in your home!
Your Robots
Current technology dictates that robots are reliant on special algorithms and hidden technologies to help them navigate. For example, the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, from iRobot (www.irobot.com, $119-$499), relies on internal programming and virtual walls to contain its coverage area. The Friendly Machines Robomow robotic lawnmower relies on hidden wiring under the ground (www.friendlymachines.com, $1,100 to $1,500).
iRobot also has been busy shaking up the home with robots for floor washing (Scooba, $299-$499), shop sweeping (Dirt Dog, $129), pool cleaning (Verro, $799-$1,099), and gutter cleaning (Looj, $99-$169). They even have a robot (ConnectR, $499) for remote visitation — you can remotely control ConnectR to roam your house and send back audio and video — who needs a dog anymore?
As your home becomes even more wirelessly connected, devices can start to triangulate their positions based on home-based homing beacons of sorts that help them sense their position at any time. The presence of a wireless home network will drive new innovation into these devices. Most manufacturers are busy designing 802.11 and other wireless technologies into the next versions of their products.
The following list highlights some other product ideas that manufacturers are working on now. We can’t yet offer price points or tell you when these products will hit the market, but expect them to come soon:
Robotic garbage taker-outers: Robotic firms are designing units that take the trash out for you, on schedule, no matter what the weather — simple as that.
Robotic mail collectors: A robotic mail collector goes and gets the mail for you. Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night, nor winds of change, nor a nation challenged can stay them from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. New wirelessly outfitted mailboxes tell you (and the robots) when your mail has arrived.
Robotic snow blowers: Manufacturers are working to perfect robotic snow blowers that continually clear your driveway and sidewalks while snow falls.
Robotic golf ball retrievers: These bots retrieve golf balls. Initially designed for driving range use, they’re being modified for the home market.
Robotic guard dogs: Robots that can roam areas and send back audio and video feeds are coming to the market. These new versions of man’s best friend can sniff out fires or lethal gases, take photos of burglars, and send intruder alerts to homeowners’ cell phones. Some have embedded artificial intelligence (AI) to act autonomously and independently. Check out the dragonlike Sanyo Banryu or its R2D2-like successor TMSUK’s Mujiro Rigurio, the Mitsubishi Wakamaru, Takenaka Engineering’s Mihari Wan, and others emerging even as we write this topic.
Robotic gutter cleaners: A range of spiderlike robots is available that can maneuver on inclines, such as roofs, and feature robotic sensors and arms that can clean areas.
Robotic cooks: Put the ingredients in, select a mode, and wait for your dinner to be cooked — it’s better than a TV dinner, for sure.
Robotic pooper scoopers: The units we have discovered roam your yard in search of something to clean up and then deposit the findings in a place you determine.
The world is still getting used to robots and their limitations. More than one company has canceled its robotic development programs until the market is more rational about its expectations. Early household robots were panned in the market because people expected them to act like people — to cook them dinner and scratch their backs on demand. The market success of the iRobot purpose-built robots has shown that buyers want robots that do something and do it well.
Still, the quest for the all-purpose android remains strong. For this reason, you’re more likely to see humanoid robots demonstrating stuff such as skipping rope at special events rather than cooking dinner in your kitchen. Products such as Honda’s ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, world.honda.com/ASIMO/) are remarkable for the basic things they can do, such as shake hands and bow, but the taskmasters we mention in the preceding list can help you with day-to-day chores.
For years, we watched Sony’s cute Aibo robotic dog go through seven generations of development, evolving into a wireless-enabled, 1,000-word barking companion that was simply fun to play with. Then the disastrous news hit that Sony had canceled the product for good. As we write, there are rumors of a PlayStation-enabled Aibo, the Aibo PS. The Wi-Fi capable AIBO PS would be completely controllable through a Sony PSP or PlayStation 3. Search online when you read this and see whether this rumor became reality. If so, you’d have a lot of fun with this new Aibo in your home.
Your Apparel
Wireless is making its way into your clothing. Researchers are already experimenting with wearables — the merging of 802.11 and Bluetooth directly into clothing so that it can have networking capabilities. Want to synch your PDA? No problem: Just stick it in your pocket. All sorts of companies are working on waterproof and washerproof devices for wirelessly connecting to your wireless home network. Burton (the snowboard people) and Motorola have a line of Bluetooth-enabled jackets called Audex (direct.motorola.com/ens/ audex/default.asp, $350). The Audex Motorola Jacket series sports built-in Bluetooth wireless stereo speakers and a wired iPod connection — so it’s up to you whether to listen to tunes or answer incoming calls. Dada Footware has launched its wireless Code M shoe line (www.dadafootwear.com, $199) that stores music and workout coaching and plays it either out loud or via Bluetooth to wireless headsets. We have even seen jackets that display advertisements on their backs and T-shirts that show the strength of any Wi-Fi wireless signal available (www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/generic/991e/).
Wireless technology will also infiltrate your clothing through radio frequency identification tags, or RFIDs, which are very small, lightweight, electronic, read-write storage devices (microchips) half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for radio queries and, when pinged, respond by transmitting their ID codes. Most RFID tags have no batteries because they use the power from the initial radio signal to transmit their responses; thus, they never wear out. Data is accessible in real time through handheld or fixed-position readers, using RF signals to transfer data to and from tags. RFID applications are infinite, but when embedded in clothing, RFIDs offer applications such as tracking people (such as kids at school) or sorting clothing from the dryer (no more problems matching socks or identifying clothes for each child’s pile).
Having wireless fun with geocaching
Geocachingis an entertaining adventure game based around the GPS technology. It’s basically a wireless treasure hunt. The idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world; the GPS locations are then posted on the Internet, and GPS users seek the caches. Once they’re found, some sort of reward may be there; the only rule is that if you take something from the cache, you need to leave something behind for others to find later. Check out what caches are near you: www.geocaching.com.
Want to find out more about GPS? Visit a couple of fun GPS tracking (pun intended!) sites, such as www.gps-practice-and-fun.com and www. gpsinformation.net.
A technology of great impact in our lifetime is GPS, which is increasingly being built into cars, cell phones, devices, and clothing. GPS equipment and chips are so cheap that you will find them everywhere. They’re used in amusement parks to help keep track of your kids. There are already prototypes of GPS-enabled shoes (the initial application has been to protect prostitutes).
Most GPS-driven applications have software that enables you to interpret the GPS results. You can grab a Web tablet at home while on your couch, wirelessly surf to the tracking Web site, and determine where Fido (or Fred) is located. Want to see whether your spouse’s car is heading home from work yet? Grab your PDA as you walk down the street, log on to a nearby hot spot, and check it out. Many applications are also being ported to cell phones, so you can use those wireless devices to find out what’s going on.
GPS-based devices — primarily in a watch or lanyard-hung form factor — are available that can track people.
Many perimeter-oriented child-safety devices emit an alarm if your child wanders outside an adjustable safety zone (such as wanders away from you in the mall). For instance, the GigaAir Child Tracking system ($190) is a two-piece, battery-powered system that consists of a clip-on unit worn by the child and a second pager-size unit carried by the parent or guardian. The safety perimeter is set by the parent and can be as little as 10 feet and as much as 75 feet. The alarm tone also acts as a homing device to help a parent and child find each other after it has gone off — important for those subway rush hours in New York City. Many other person-locator products are on the market, such as a more removal-resistant unit from ionKids (www.brick housesecurity.com/vbsik.html, $200) and a GPS Kid Locator Tracker Backpack (www.spyshops.ca, $900).
Note that there is a difference between a tracking device and a locator device. Tracking devices will tell where someone has been, but only after the device returns to you. A popular example is the GPS Trackstick (www.trackstick. com). A locator device, on the other hand, will remotely tell you where it is at any particular time. GPS-enabled phones and services are examples of these. Don’t buy one expecting the other!
Various possible monthly fees are associated with personal tracking and location devices. Some don’t have any fees; they involve short-range, closed-system wireless signals. Some charge a monthly fee, just like a cell phone plan. Some charge per-use fees, like per-locate attempts. Be sure to check the fine print when you’re buying any sort of wireless location device to make sure you don’t have lots of extra fees that go along with it. (That’s why we like 802.11-based products. They’re cheap and often don’t have these fees. But then again, they don’t have the range that some of these other systems do.)
Applied Digital Solutions (www.digitalangel.com) is on the leading edge. The company has developed the VeriChip, which can be implanted under the skin of people in high-risk (think kidnapping) areas overseas. This chip is an implantable, 12mm x 2.1mm radio frequency device, about the size of the point of a ballpoint pen. The chip contains a unique verification number.
Although watches are a great form factor for lots of wireless connectivity opportunities, they have been hampered by either wired interface requirements (like a USB connection) or an infrared (IR) connection, which requires line of sight to your PC. Expect these same devices to quickly take on Bluetooth and 802.11 interfaces so that continual updating — as with the Microsoft Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT) model (direct.msn.com) — can occur.
Creating wireless connectivity via jewelry bears its own set of issues because of the size and weight requirements of the host jewelry for any wireless system. The smaller the jewelry, the less power the wireless transmitter has to do its job. The less power, the shorter the range and the more limited the bandwidth and application of the device.
Cellular Jewelry (www.cellularjewelry.com) offers bracelets, watches, pens, and other devices that flash when you receive a phone call. Tired of missing calls when that phone is in your purse or jacket pocket? These devices — which work well only with GSM phones, not CDMA ones — alert you in a visual fashion, and in a fashionable way too!
Wearables are going wireless — MP3 sunglasses, Wi-Finder purses, GPS belts — you name it, someone has thought of it! Check out the Engadget wearables blog, at wearables.engadget.com.
Everything in Your Home
Did we leave anything out? Well, yes, in fact we have. That’s because everything in your home that uses electricity can potentially be wirelessly enabled to a home control and automation network. In next topic we talked a little bit about ZigBee and Z-Wave, two wireless technologies that are hitting the market today and are designed around very low-cost and low-power chips that can be embedded in any electrically powered device in the home. Other low-price and low-power wireless technologies, such as Wibree, are also in the works and can expand your home’s wireless control network.
Where you’ll use ZigBee and Z-WaVe
Low power means short distance. It also means small. You’ll be using technologies such as ZigBee and Z-Wave to do things such as allow lamps to be controlled by your PC and to tell you whether or not your doors are locked.
Energy management is a huge potential application for these technologies. Consider the following implementations of lower power chips:
ii Allowing electric and gas meters to talk to your household energy hogs and tell them when it’s less expensive to do their chores (such as run the laundry). Your meter can also talk to the home’s wireless network to communicate usage back to the central station (so no one has to come by your house to check the meter).
i Installing programmable controllable thermostats (PCT) designed to improve energy efficiency and electric service consumption. Using their wireless connections, they can reach out to sensors in the house to drive more efficient use of energy zones and time-of-day setbacks.
i Using sensor-outfitted outlets for each appliance to monitor them for energy usage and to report back to central in-home energy control programs — programs you can monitor on your television or PC.
Z-Wave, and to a lesser extent ZigBee, are also focused on home automation. Because they are wireless, these technologies allow you to install, upgrade, and network your home control system without wires. You can configure and run multiple systems from a single remote control. You can also receive automatic notification if there’s something unusual happening in the house (like your oven is on at 2:00 A.M.).
As your wireless backbone becomes pervasive in the home, expect lots of ZigBee and Z-Wave products to form the last few feet of these connections because their lower cost pushes them into smaller places around the house. This is truly the next wave of wireless expansion in your house.
Because they use mesh networking technologies, where signals can bounce from device to device throughout the home (like a frog crossing a pond on top of lily pads), the more ZigBee or Z-Wave devices you have in your home, the better the network works (a frog can hop across a pond covered with lily pads a lot more easily than it can get across a pond with the pads spread far apart). If your power utility puts ZigBee or Z-Wave in your home for energy-savings purposes, you can take advantage of these devices when you add your own home control and automation devices. Remember, with mesh networking systems, the more you have, the better they work!
Introducing Wibree
A new, even lower-powered (think watch batteries, not AC power) technology is arriving that can embed wireless control and networking in anything: Wibree. Think of Wibree as a low-power option for Bluetooth; Wibree and Bluetooth technology are complementary technologies. Wibree even uses the same antenna and 2.4 GHz frequency band as Bluetooth.
Bluetooth technology is well suited for streaming and data-intensive applications such as file transfer, and Wibree is designed for applications where ultra-low-power consumption, small size, and low cost are needed. So Wibree in many cases picks up where Bluetooth leaves off.
Whereas your cell phone might talk to your car via Bluetooth, your car keys might have Wibree inside them. That way, when you lose your keys, you can search the house for them by querying Wibree gateways to see if anyone detects them.
Bluetooth and Wibree are wireless personal area networks (WPANs) with a star topology, and thus are truly designed for PAN. ZigBee, driven by its focus on wireless monitoring, lighting control, energy conservation, and so on, is a mesh technology in which one fixed device communicates wirelessly with another. So you might see all of these in your home.
How might you use Wibree?
Sports and wellness: Sports watches that connect to sensors located on the body, shoes, and other fitness gear can gather data on heart rate, distance, speed, and acceleration and send the information to a mobile phone.
Healthcare: Wibree-driven sensors can be built into stand-alone health-monitoring devices that can send vital health-related information (blood pressure, glucose level) to Bluetooth-Wibree dual-mode devices (such as mobile phones and personal computers), which can process this information and send alerts to the mobile phones of patients and caretakers.
Office and mobile accessories: You can use Wibree’s small size and ability to extend battery life in office and mobile accessories. These can also use Wibree to avoid dongles for connectivity, which add an extra component and raise the overall cost.
Entertainment: Remote controls, gaming accessories, and other entertainment devices can use Wibree’s sensor technologies to interact with one another.
Watches: Watches and wrist-top devices can use Wibree to connect them to mobile phones and accessories. Now you can use your watch to control that inbound call, or to send a quick alert via text messaging.
You’ll see a lot of Bluetooth-Wibree dual-mode implementation, where Wibree functionality is integrated with Bluetooth for a minor incremental cost by utilizing key Bluetooth components. Examples of devices that would benefit from the Bluetooth-Wibree dual-mode implementation are mobile phones and personal computers.
