Interiors
Phone home
Networked appliances create virtual houses that can be operated via your keitai. Stuart Braun makes the call.

Life in the Japanese home will soon transcend time and space, according to electric appliance giant Matsushita Electric. The advent of wireless broadband Internet technology, first featured on the i-mode phone and soon, via the launch of the "3rd Generation" phone network, to become a Japan-wide standard, has the capacity to provide Internet-enabled audio and visual interconnection between the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, home office and car. Maker of National and Panasonic household electrical goods, Matsushita Electric calls it "e-living" and has built a virtual home, dubbed eHII House, to illustrate its utopian vision of the very near future.

Cool communication: National's voice network refrigerator

e-living
Located at Matsushita's pyramidal Shinagawa Multimedia Center, eHII House (Housing Informational Infrastructure), completed in early 2001, is a home of "networked" home appliances that allows residents to do everything, from cooking a meal to monitoring and controlling home temperatures or energy costs, via a mobile phone, PDA or PC. Here, wireless broadband technology is the key. A partnership with telecommunications giant NTT, and their revolutionary iMode and 3rd Generation mobile Internet services (Panasonic is also one of the largest suppliers of NTT handsets), put Matsushita in a unique position to make e-living, and a broadband link between you and your microwave or television, a reality.

Connecting your fridge to the outside world will offer immense advantages, says Matsushita. Inspect the contents of your freezer via your videophone while you're shopping, or leave a message on an external voice monitor (National's Voice Network Refrigerator, which is currently on sale) for family or roommates to inform them that a meal is waiting. Similarly, a networked phone/camera remote unit at your entrance gate can let you confirm, again via your phone, the identity of visitors, or to converse with them from anywhere in or outside the home. Meanwhile, an "Echonet" terminal, also connected to the Internet, will allow you to manage and monitor home power usage and the potential for energy savings. While voice is now a standard with all these devices, real-time video will become de rigueur as the scope of the broadband mobile network increases.

Fully networked home cyber office

Pervasive access to the Internet is the lifeblood of e-living. The eHII House "Gateway," an Internet hub that links, via both hardwired and wireless connections, home appliances with external broadband Internet services, and pumps high-speed Internet to devices located in every corner of the home—from the kitchen to the home office and toilet. eHII House's central Internet cockpit is a 50-inch high definition plasma television that, in addition to digital broadcasting, facilitates instant access to your email, or allows you to download videos and MP3s during commercial breaks. Elsewhere, culinary enthusiasts can research recipes on a kitchen Internet terminal—recipes can then be downloaded onto a memory card that is loaded into a microwave oven that will auto-cook your meal to the specifics of the recipe.

Doctor in the house: Internet-enabled electronic health checker

Virtual pet
In the e-living environment, Internet will also become an intimate part of your bathroom. An electronic health monitoring system—also connected to a toilet that monitors your weight, calculates body fat and checks for sugar levels in your urine—tracks pulse rate, blood pressure and temperature while constantly networking the data to your doctor. Pre-empting Japan's aging population, eHII also features a bedside, networked pet robot that, connected to sensors in the bed, monitors the health and condition of its master and informs relatives via the Internet—it can also be contacted by mobile phone—if problems arise.

eHII House has foregone the traditional landline in favor of online telephony, a feature that will radically reduce call costs. The Panasonic IP Telephony Unit is a central part of the eHII home office, which includes a range of networked Panasonic gadgets, including a notebook computer, video conferencing unit and video presentation table. Along with digital video and editing equipment, located in a hobby room, these videos can be viewed on networked PCs or digital televisions located throughout the house or in your networked Panasonic car, featuring a PC, DVD and 3G phone and utilizing voice recognition for safety.

With the recent, and as yet relatively successful, launch of 3G wireless services in Japan, the virtual realm of e-living has become a reality. Soon we'll all be living like The Jetsons.

Photos courtesy of Matsushita Electric

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