9:14am Wednesday 2nd January 2013
It seems like a perfect house. The building sounds the alarm every morning. It cooks the food, it keeps the floors clean. It repairs itself.
The smart home was envisaged more than 60 years ago by science fiction author Ray Bradbury in his Martian Chronicles. His house had just one flaw: the family was long-dead while the house just carried on.
Now the latest advances in technology are starting to bridge the gap between 21st century reality and Bradbury's fiction (minus the nuclear war).
The internet of things, in which physical objects are connected to the web, will make our environment more intelligent than ever.
In 2012 we saw smart thermostats tweak room temperatures to suit owners' habits; plants post to Twitter that they needed watering; and cars alert each other to traffic jams...
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