On Saturday I headed down into the big smoke to visit the Microsoft mHome, which is a media enabled house in lovely quiet leafy street in West London. Essentially it's a demo house to show the possibilities of Meda Center and a variety of other cool features, such as the Mirror TV and the vibrating stone - a speaker that is fist size vibrating err, well stone, that you place on a solid surface and the vibrations turn that surface into a speaker. Surprisingly good, considering how snobiish I can be about hifi. I also like being able to write out the shopping list on a table (handwriting) and then copying and pasting this into a Tesco online search box, whereupon the writing was recognised and the items added to the list. Mind you going to Tesco is my weekly time out - if I used home shopping I'd never leave the house at all.
For me though the house didn't go nearly far enough, probably due to two reaons: the brief, being to show Microsoft technology and the home being an existing home without much in the way of interface to home automation, The house already has Linn Knekt multi-room audio controllers in many rooms, but this wasn't interfaced into. While the MCE features are great (and I really do love MCE), wouldn't it be cool if you could already utilise existing functionality - just select MCE as your music source from the Knekt system? The second area I though lacking was the multi-room support within MCE itself. Three of the rooms had separate MCE boxes, and while that gives great flexibility, the MCE boxes record TV locally. This means that if you record TV on one MCE box it's not automatically available for viewing on another. You can probably share these folders (I'm not sure about that) but it's an extra step that many users wouldn't want (or indeed be able) to do. The one step missing is extenders - I'm desperately waiting for these in the UK because it might mean I don't have to buy yet another machine for MCE (a quietone for underneath the TV). I could just shove some tuners in a PC and put that in the eisting cabinet, and then use an extender. For the multi-room house this is an attractive proposition, as it allows all recorded TV to be stored on the main MCE box, while extenders just make this available to the other rooms. Now the lack of hardware precludes this from being shown in the mHome, but there was an XBox sitting underneath the main TV and there is extender software for the XBox. This should have been enabled and placed in the 'teenager bedroom' (the natural home for an XBox in this scenario). The XBox 360 is of course going to have MCE features built-in (what these are is still under wraps and I only know what I've read on the Web) so once that's released one of these should be placed in the mHome.
The final let down really is due to the actual house and this was home automation. These are things that generally need to be built in as a house is constructed, as retro-fitting often incurs significant time and effort. We did see an HA add in for MCE that controlled a table lamp via X10, but it would have been far better to see the entire lighting system done this way. That wasn't possible in this house as the lights weren't automated (X10 sucks for main lights anyway, far better to use cbus or another alternative), but it was frustrating to have the potential and not see it realised. The add-in (the name of which I can't remember) also supported HVAC and alarm systems, both of which have exceedingly poor support in the UK. It can be done, but fully integrated systems are few and far between.
Overall a positive experience and I'm grateful for the chance I had to see it.
[Listening to: Bob Harris Friday - - ]