Microsoft HoloLens

The latest and greatest from Microsoft is out and its a 3D Glass to create an Augmented reality interface for you to interact with a system to best of my knowledge.

The first impression I got is, its a good Gaming interface. The Kinect and XBox together makes a good gaming environment to me as I hate having to carry wands in my hand. Imagine now the TV also removed from the mix and the objects all hang around you, With the aptly lighted room, you can probably have a much better experience with may be part of the image on the screen and the rest of the strip spread out infront of you in virtual reality. Much more live experience. And possibility for accessories like Boots and gloves to give you feedback on contact with  other objects! The experience can be good, geek worthy, atleast!

In a real world, where do I use it? I can think of designers, Scientists, using it, with imaginary objects flying all around us as in Iron Man Design room. Again, pretty snazzy at that! e-Commerce also has a potential use.

Will I be thrilled to have a normal computer screen and windows floating around me in virtual field when I want to use it to say send a mail or deal with files like in Mission impossible or Minority Report? May be not. Again, for a social interaction scenario like Skype call or facetime call, it may be interesting. Not so much for facebook!

I understand these interfaces also can change if we have new methods to interact with the ether world. At this point, I do not fancy myself having to wear some dorky glass and acting crazy trying to grab or nudge invisible objects!

Another reason I am not betting with this is that, Microsoft do not have a history of making something like these a success. XBox was a pleasant surprise to me. And they have a very bad history of stretching their timelines beyond reason.

Google glass has come and withdrawn for the time. Not sure if it will resurface. Only time can tell where these products will lead us. If not Microsoft, lets hope that this will kindle some ideas elsewhere where it will come out as a usable product!

Wake up in a brief!

Voice Brief is an app that can read out some of the things you otherwise will be skimming through in your morning routines. I had downloaded this earlier and stopped using since I am no CEO and did not fancy my mails and facebook posts read out loud to every one around.

But that does not take away anything from the app and the idea itself. You cannot discount the easiness with which you can have the stuff read out to you when you take a bath with out having to touch your iOS device with your soapy wet hands often!

It does not give the full feel of seeing the video or image spilled all over in the social carpet, but nonetheless its an easy and quick way if you are in a hurry.

Now that I have committed myself to a SONOS for my whole home audio, I wanted to check if I can get this audio coming out of the SONOS speakers. (Even before that,  Can I have a SONOS speaker in the bathroom. I was not all in for having a speaker in the bathroom, but sometimes, it may prove to be useful, especially if you plan to have a whole house announcement system or if you do not want to miss out on any of your audio programs or would like to listen to Music in bathroom)

Straight answer is since I have a work around to airplay, I can. And Play 1 is designed to be Humidity resistant. And I understand SONOS trying to keep their service focus clearly defined.

Given all this one clean solution I would look for is to have a service which can stream audio to SONOS with this capability so that choosing that channel will give a clean solution.

I am yet to come across with such a channel, and not sure how to create one if I require to. Anyone got any ideas?

Update: I found the following two sites which gives some possible approach to this. One which tells me how to add a streaming URL to the SONOS and one which tells which is a free Streaming server. Hmm, now its about how to build a stream from your sources to read out. Will Mac have a work flow to read out all my latest mails and facebook posts and stuffs like that?

Phew! Now I have the Hue!

I was just wishful thinking about the Hue from Philips and inquired with my Co-Bro(Who has links to Philips) if we can source Hue from Singapore as it is not available in India. (Sourcing from US had its own challenges as the voltage will not match-Update: I came across some post which said Philips Hue Bulbs are 110-240 Compatible. Not sure.) He said that its not easy. I left it there as I was not fully into buying it anyways.

Then a few days later, I was told to travel to Singapore on an official matter! Hue was again getting some traction and I went and did some research. The price was double that in US as with many stuffs in Singapore is, But then I decided to take the plunge and got the starter kit!

Back in India, I connected and tried it. The kit comes with three bulbs and one connector hub which is a mandatory requirement for you to control the light except for on and off. (Was not aware of it before, But Luckily I went for the starter pack and the decision paid off) The Hub need to be connected via Ethernet port and you have to have it plugged into the power. I am not sure if this will end up having some issue if I distribute the bulbs now in the house as the individual bulbs I am not hooking explicitly to the WiFi. Some research is required to find out. Will update if I have some info on this, later/

The device worked as promised. I could turn it on and off at will, change colors using the app! A nice touch is that there is widget available to put the functionality on to the Widget screen of iPhone! I tried one of the music driven app from the app store but that did not seem to work. I might have missed out some thing so once again, will need some research on it. If it does work, it will be great if we plan any party! Disco music lights! 

Play Bar and Play Five

When I decided to go with SONOS for my distributed music, I had a long list of Speakers added to my wishlist in Amazon and I used to look back at it and wonder if I will ever get them. Now, few months down the timeline, I have most of them and they have helped me to improve my music listening practice much!

The Play1s I got first was joined by the 2 Play 5s and one Play bar recently. I connected the Play Bar to the TV and the voice was not coming:-( Then the SONOS told me to check if the Digital Audio on the TV was on. Changed the Digital Audio from Auto to PC and the audio started coming out of the Power Bar! What a relief!

Then I realized I can channel the audio from the TV to any room I want! So if I want to just push the audio when the news is playing to another room or when a song is going into yet another, it was all possible! That was an interesting feature!

I did not have the SONOS Base as I was not fully convinced of the need. Now having seen all the speakers, may be I will get one of those too some day!

Mean time, I had some challenge with the network in a room upstairs as the repeater there was dropping the connection intermittently. And I had exhausted the budget with all the other components. So I dropped a note to the Sales Head and promptly came the replay that they can ship me a Bridge free of cost! And that gift came in last week! (Thanks a lot, folks, your service is also as good as your products!) Now the network issue is kind of gone, (Unless the stream itself is slow due to my network capacity limitation)

Overall, a wonderful experience! I am so happy I went the SONOS way!

An Eye For an Eye

The most basic component in Home automation could be the security. As a matter of fact in many cases, the only component:-)
My cousin asked me recently to recommend a camera he can use to monitor any room from web or iOS. A very common requirement when we have to leave house to strangers to manage or have people who need special attention, be it kids or elders.
This will be a very important aspect of the security. It is not just about having cameras and door open sensors, its about being able to track people or activity in different parts of the house without being intrusive to privacy. A camera might be one aspect which can be turned on or off when needed.

Tags or sensors which can be carried by people to identify themselves, or face recognition can do this intelligently. The technology is not mature enough to do it at home I guess since we do not see the face recognition based tracking in many products. But with technology becoming more common place, this could evolve some time soon, keeping you well informed about arrival or departure of others checking them  in at different zones or locations, and also about suspicious individuals spotted at your place.

Gadgets like Apple watch and many health monitoring devices, can monitor the rhythm of your heart beat and other vitals and report any abnormalities as indicators of variances from regular patterns.

The zone awareness can go further marking the mostly populated zones regulating the power consumption to focus on areas where most people spend. It can also follow you to route your calls to place where you are rather than a single point. With mobile phone being the primary mode of communication, this may look a low priority now, but many still leave their phone in one place once reached at home either for charging or to just free their hands, and then when it rings a frantic sprint takes place to pick the call. If the audio systems can be connected up to the main communication hub,  the calls can be routed through them and the phone can be anywhere at home.

Climate sensors informing you of open windows when the weather gets bad may not be a common use case in US where most of the windows are closed, but I am sure elsewhere it may be an important one. Also informing you when your kid is outside when weather gets bad or some other event takes place connecting them up and giving you a very specific warning can help a lot.

In places like India where public transportation is recently under lot of notoriety for bad incidents, may be having a system where we can subscribe to location of people and their transport outside the house is also an important usecase.

Thus Spoke the Hub

Home automation is getting to be really busy and there is a large paradigm shift happening from web cams focused to Artificial Intelligence centered solutions. Many hubs are in Kickstarter, (Including one called Homie from India:) The last one I saw was really interesting, giving the Home a personality of its own. And why not?

Cubic is a Russian origin solution which extends Amazon Echo further to the Activity domain also.  And since its not distracted by a different motivation, its more apt to be open.

Its in the very early stages of development and a lot is to be seen. Nothing is expected till end of 2016 mainly, But I have a lot of interest in this tool. With their Watch working as the badge and some good home hub working as the cube,  Apple is well poised to thrill me the same way. Apple, are you watching?

Ninja Sphere and Automation Hub

Ninja Sphere is a home automation hub allowing you to interact with Voice and wave of hand. A learner, it is said to adapt to your needs.

That is good. I am very pleased with its cool looks,(All that I have seen in pictures alone, alas!) With the integration other Wireless devices at home, security ones and media ones, it can provide you a good amount of use case coverage.

One challenger to the throne was from Revolv which is bought and killed by Goodle now. (Why would google kill it? They will mostly club its technology with the Android TV and their automation ambitions and launch one or two products I guess)

Question that remains is, will Apple update their Apple TV to work as a hub for Home automation. And if and when they do it, will they make it really worth the wait?

The success of the implementation will depend a lot on the reliability of the system, as when people want to depend on the automated workflow, it should just work.

Taking the example of the universal remote at home, I took a lot of pain in mapping the buttons of remotes but that seemed to be a never ending process. It invariably happens that the button I need to press will be one that I am yet to map:-) And it became so complicated that end of the day I never used it. Where as the apps of each individual appliance still was usable for me with just one phone at hand. Now, Homekit is planning to do what universal remote did for individual remotes.

That being the case, I understand that all the functions of the individual appliances will not be taken over by Homekit and mostly it will unify the generic functions so that we can string them together. That is what a home automation should aim to achieve else it will become too tied to the products each has.

Apple has Siri with them already and should enable them  to execute some of the workflows with voice. Provided Siri works perfectly. I do not know about folks in the states, here in India, I have issues with the performance of Siri. It takes a bit of time to respond and many times I get a response, "I am unable to help right now"

All being done, we may not be able to do away with the remotes as there could be less tech savvy people who will feel comfortable doing things the old way. They will not want to watch the movie on the home theater but they would definitely want to listen to music or watch the TV and their daily doze of soap. This will leave couple of remotes still on the coffee table, but I do hope, for the rest of us, we can still ask Siri to start the show some time soon.

Back to where I started off from. So will I get a Ninja Sphere? Not now atleast. Will wait to see what Apple has in making. I feel comfortable in  their eco system and that has paid back well for me in  ease.