Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—The twin fixations of CES this year are, to no one’s surprise, wearable technology and the internet of things. (OK, and crazy-ass TVs. Always room for crazy-ass TVs!) Among the wearables, many are taking advantage of exotic, cutting-edge sensors. These gizmos don’t just want to count your steps; they hope to peer into your skin, your muscles, your brain, your blood.
You don’t see the same sensor explosion with the internet of things stuff. In fact, some of the most compelling “smart home” products at this year’s show rely on a totally mundane sensor: the camera. Not that it’s a bad thing. The humble camera, paired with increasingly sophisticated computer vision, could be capable of some very interesting things. Eventually, it could become the real brains of the smart home.
The soft-focus smart home fantasy we’re sold is one where all of our things—our TVs, our light bulbs, our front doors, our coffee pots—connect happily and effortlessly to each other and to our mobile devices. A stroll through the area of the CES expo floor dedicated to smart home devices reveals a somewhat more sober picture: A handful or internet-connected locks, a bunch of thermostats, heaps of smartphone-controlled lightbulbs, and cameras. Lots of home security cameras.
Some of these are uninspired Dropcam wanna-bes. Others show more imagination. One standout is the forthcoming Netatmo Welcome, one of the first home security cameras with built-in face recognition. Instead of just recording video for you to watch later, or alerting you vaguely when it detects “activity” in the home, the Welcome uses proprietary computer vision algorithms to figure out who’s actually coming and going. You can set it to ping your phone, for example, whenever your kids get home from school. It stores video locally, instead of in the cloud, which some will find reassuring. In the demo I saw, the HD video looked crisp, the field of view was wide, and the software seemed to be locking in on faces quickly and accurately as other attendees ambled by.
Netatmo’s camera will surely appeal to anxious homeowners and fretful parents. Along with Simplicam, another security camera that announced new facial recognition component at CES, you can see it as the logical next step for the home monitoring product category. A little smarter, a little more personal.
But once a camera knows who’s in the room with it, you can imagine all sorts of little flourishes it might soon be able to choreograph. The lighting could be adjusted based on what you’re doing; the temperature could be raised a few degrees because it knows you like it warm; certain electronics could be powered down when nobody’s home.
Fred Potter, CEO and founder of Netatmo, says bringing computer vision to an affordable home camera was technically challenging—it involves ton of raw data and requires significant processing power. But Potter hinted that Welcome’s initial functionality is just the start. “We have hundreds of ideas,” he told me. The camera system will go on sale this spring, and pricing will be in line with competing home cams, Potter says.
A Third Eye for Your Home
If you want to get a little more speculative about what cameras might be soon able to do, just look at all the wild computer vision stuff coming out of the academic world. In a recent talk, MIT researcher Greg Borenstein provided an enthusiastic overview of the field. (Its title: “The More Pixels Law: How the Camera Is Becoming the World’s Most Important Sensor.”) The gist of Borenstein’s talk: Cheap cameras are getting better and better, and researchers are finding more and more to do with them. Computer vision research itself is booming, thanks in part to interest from deep-pocketed government agencies who are increasingly relying on tools like facial recognition. When breakthroughs are made, they don’t take long to find their way into consumer products.
The work itself is wild. One group Borenstein mentions is using cameras to monitor infants’ heart rates through their skin. It’s an illustrative example. Here, the lowly camera isn’t just doing something impressive. It’s actually replicating the functionality of those more exotic, invasive sensors!
Looking at the examples Borenstein shows, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine the home cameras of ten years hence quietly tabulating the calories of whatever snack you’re nibbling on, or reminding you where you set down your keys when you got home, or even monitoring your heart rate through your skin while you’re on the couch watching Monday Night Football. That, you must admit, would be a pretty smart home.
Of course, this may sound familiar. We’ve heard a version of this dream before. What of the Kinect, Microsoft’s insanely powerful living-room eye? It flirted with much of this functionality and never really caught on. Why? Maybe because it was saddled by its dependence on the Xbox and the TV. Maybe because people weren’t keen on the idea of a camera watching them watch TV in the first place. Maybe they still aren’t.
But maybe it was just that Kinect’s debut as a wonky gaming peripheral obscured its simpler, more mainstream potential. Whatever the case, there’s a new crop of friendly, simple home cameras on the way, and slowly but surely, you can bet they’ll be put to work doing more than keeping your home secure.
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