OTHER TECH

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With Lifeware, the promise of digital technology to complement day-to-day living would seem fulfilled. Once you convert anything to digital information, it's just a bunch of 1s and 0s, identical in everything but sequence to all the other 1s and 0s flying through the network and residing on the various hard drives. Theoretically, this means that everything can interact with everything else, as long as there's a good reason for it to do so. This potential leads to elaborate whole-house scenarios - called (not surprisingly) Lifescenes - that go well beyond even the most complex macros we're all used to programming into universal remotes.

Try this one on for size: You've planned an elaborate summer party that's going to sprawl through most of the main rooms of the first floor and out into the backyard pool area. Since you'll have your hands full once guests start to arrive, you program the system a few hours ahead of time, knowing you can always tweak your scenario along the way and make on-the-fly adjustments once everybody's there. Using any of the video screens in the network, you stage the following Lifescene:

• At 6:30, a half hour before the first guests are due to arrive, all the rooms you don't want people wandering into will be locked down.
• At the same time, the security cameras for the driveway and front door will come up on the video monitors throughout the house so you can check for arriving guests as you're getting ready in the bedroom and bathroom.
• At 6:45, the pool cover will roll back.
• You set the thermostat so the house will be 72° when people first arrive, but then have it drop to 68° at 8, as the accumulating guests start to heat the rooms up.
• The blinds on the west side of the house will close at 8, so the rooms won't be flooded with light from the sunset.
• The patio lights will come up at 8:30, as it begins to get dark out back. Meanwhile, the house lights will come on as well, but at a relatively dim, mood-setting level.
• The music you're blasting as you run around getting everything ready will drop back to a more conversation-friendly level right at 7. But at 9, as the party kicks into high gear, the music videos you've got stored on the Media Center hard drives will start playing on the various video screens, and the whole-house audio system will go up a few dB.
• At 1 a.m., after everyone's gone, the lights both inside and outside the house will dim, all the outside doors will lock, the security system will be alarmed, the blinds on the west side of the house will reopen, the pool cover will roll back into place, the TVs will shut off, and background music will play for an hour as you finish cleaning up and get ready for bed.