Exploring the House of the Future
Disney's Innoventions Dream Home

iy Tammy LeRoy

How will "smart home" technology be integrated into American homes in the not-so-distant future? Hoping to gain insight on this question, scores of media representatives converged at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., on June 16 for the media grand opening of the Innoventions Dream Home. The exhibit opened to the public the following day.

Homebuilder Taylor Morrison, Microsoft, HP and Life|ware joined with Disneyland Resort in a five-year project to demonstrate how a connected digital lifestyle could simplify and enhance different aspects of daily family life. Many of the exhibit's features-temperature, lighting and window shades controlled by the home's computer, for example-are just what one would expect to see in a high-tech home. Some features of the Dream Home, however, are both unexpected and truly clever.

As media members tour the 5,000-square-foot home on opening day, Taylor Morrison CEO and President Sheryl Palmer is pleased with guests' reactions to the exhibit. "It's just overwhelming," she remarks. "There has been a lot of the 'wow' factor today." Indeed, visitors are wowed by a mirror that allows the user to "try on" virtual outfits from her closet, by temperature settings and artwork that change to suit each family member who enters the room, and by a prototype printer that forms a plastic 3D models of scanned items.

Function and Fun

Guests can interact with the fictional residents of the home who demonstrate how family members might use the technology engineered into the exhibit through the collaborative efforts of the vendor partners. These companies showcase new technologies and products including the latest in mobile phones, PCs, digital entertainment and gaming.

The project goal is to make home-centered technology intuitive and simple to use. Visitors can see firsthand how to interconnect a home's automated functions in a seamless effort while interconnecting also with the outside community and the world. Digital media plays a large role in the Dream Home concept. Throughout the rooms, LCD screens that range from 1.8 inches to 100 inches keep family members connected and up to date. Over 2,500 pieces of digital media are available to all devices in the home, including photos, recorded video, music, graphics, recorded television and movies.

Also integrated into the Dream Home décor are 73 digital picture frames, including 26 wall-mounted frames with photos and artwork that change depending on which family member is in the room. More than 2,000 photos from a digital library rotate through the frames.

The kitchen includes a virtual bulletin board and appliances that can "talk" to one another. When a recipe is brought up on a screen in the island, the interconnected system checks the pantry and refrigerator to see whether ingredients are missing or out of date. If items are needed, a shopping list is created on the virtual bulletin board.

The dining room table is an interactive surface with four screens that can display images separately or as one large, tiled image. When the family sets their mobile phones on the table at the end of the day, photos and videos spill across the screens. The table can also be used to create art, do homework and assemble videopuzzles.

The Dream Home family room includes a state-of-the-art home theater with 7.1 surround sound and a 100-inch television screen. A boy's bedroom with a Peter Pan theme includes a pirate ship bed crafted from solid cherry wood. Special effects for story time include video that appears on the ship's sail and the surrounding walls, and a cannon that shoots holes through virtual clouds on the ceiling.

Life|ware's software brings the devices in the Innoventions Dream Home together to provide the family's entertainment and to make the home run more efficiently. In the great room, RFID (radio frequency identification) technology automatically triggers pictures on the walls, cues music and adjusts the lighting and temperature to meet the preferences of the particular family member who enters the room.

Some of these high-tech features are readily available while others are in the trial stages and would be cost prohibitive for most homes. However, it isn't too far-fetched to imagine how homeowners could use these technologies for entertainment and convenience in their day-to-day lives.

Palmer raises the question: "How do you go from here to there?" She notes that although the prototype of a new car model might cost $50,000 to build, by the time it's produced on an assembly line in its final version, the cost is much lower. "Some of the technology that's in here is the prototype and will continue to develop," she says. "As we get to this level of knowledge, it will really help the partners understand how you continue to move forward." Palmer says at least 65 percent of the Dream Home's features are available at retail and could be incorporated into a home today.

The Project

The Taylor Morrison team, which contributed many of the design elements on the home's façade, patio and party tent areas, worked closely with Disney designer Tom Zofrea to understand the design concept and style aesthetic for the home. Working together with the design team, Microsoft, HP and Life|ware provided state-of-the-art technology to create a smart home with features that would truly enhance the lives of homeowners.

Taylor Morrison designer Deborah Foster and her staff wanted to translate Zofrea's exterior designs into architectural elements befitting a traditional Taylor Morrison product. The resulting façade included stonework, custom wrought iron and architecturally detailed wood beams and trim. Taylor Morrison designers also helped achieve the Disney vision through the selection of interior materials such as the home's kitchen surfaces, flooring and various fabrics.

The design style of the home's interior and exterior is a bold mix of Art Deco and Craftsman. Unlike Monsanto's 1957 House of the Future-an exhibit that remained at Disney's Tomorrowland entrance until 1967-the new version has less of a futuristic look. "What was really important to us was making it very familiar, very approachable for the customer," says Palmer. Although advanced technology is the star of the exhibit, one can imagine typical families carrying out their everyday activities in these rooms.

"You want the technology to be a benefit within their home that helps them live the lifestyle they want to," Palmer says. "We don't want that to be a primary focus. It's your home first, and then the technology complements your lifestyle."

Of course, the Dream Home is more of a collection of rooms on exhibit than an actual home. There is no master bedroom, and those who want to see the bathroom of the future will have to go elsewhere. But Palmer says the exhibit was never planned to be an actual house.

A Learning Experience

Palmer believes the house's "Design Your Dream Home" feature will help Taylor Morrison discover which technology features potential home buyers from various parts of the country are most interested in. Visitors can use a touch screen to select floor plans, technology features and location as well as some design features. "Imagine if you have 50,000 people in the next 30 days, and 35,000 happen to select one or two technologies," Palmer says. "That would be pretty telling. Then, you try to understand the demographic and the cost that goes along with it."

"I'll be shocked if we don't start taking some of the things we've learned and now put them to practical use in our sales offices and in our model homes," she says. "This is a dream house. Put it in real life and see how people want to interact with it." Not only should the data collected tell the homebuilder what kind of smart home technology consumers are most interested in-it should also tell them which features people in specific markets are most interested in. "What we offer in our homes in Scottsdale might be very different from what we offer in our homes in Tucson," Palmer says.

In fact, Life|ware is already working with Taylor Morrison and other homebuilders to develop technology packages at varying levels of automation that home buyers can choose from when purchasing a new home. Bret Fitzgerald, Life|ware's vice president of marketing, predicts that technology may come to many homes on a small scale at first, with homeowners adding features incrementally. "You start out small-a media room with some lights, some automated shades, a music system," Fitzgerald says. "Then two years later, your whole home is automated." He believes truly advanced features-a refrigerator that becomes an oven when cook time is programmed to begin, for example-will be added to automated homes piece by piece.

The recent ups and downs in the housing market have stolen the spotlight from some of the truly exciting things going on in the homebuilding industry. The remarkable advancements in home automation are something many homebuilders have chosen not to overlook. Palmer hopes the Innoventions Dream Home experience will leave Taylor Morrison better poised to give the next wave of buyers the features they'll want in the house of the future.

Tammy LeRoy is Editor of New Homes & Lifestyles Magazine.