The MIT Mobile Experience Lab has produced a pretty good demonstration video of a future home. The video showcases technologies such as a personal travel assistant, energy tools and other automated services. The video is a very good example of what kind of things are generally going on at the moment in the whole smart home/ubicomp/internet of things field.
We’ve done quite a bit of benchmarking work in the last couple of months. A lot of good stuff going on but it seems that a lot of the concepts out there fall into four categories.
The whole field is quite new so it shouldn’t be too unreasonable to think that people would be exploring and imagining things that are all over the map. I guess these areas are the low hanging fruit of the field. The ones that are easiest to imagine and therefore easiest to sell to the people that decide which business opportunities to pursue.