Comment by bandushrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bandushrew | Hacker News Reader

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I believe that the main reason it is hard to see the benefits is that we dont yet have the interesting infrastructure inside that house that an IoT will allow.

ie, I think it is actually too early in the IoT life cycle to really visualise the impact it will have.

Let me explain - currently our lighting and applicances are designed entirely around the idea that they will be manually operated and standalone pieces of equipment.

Once that assumption is taken away, and houses are built with a different assumption, suddenly magic begins to happen - imagine that instead of a few lights in the lounge, there was a ceiling and walls covered in thousands of LED lights that could be independently controlled via the internet. The average home could literally have lighting shows. An entire wall could be utilised as alternately a television or a photo viewer, even a wall in every room.

etc, etc. Use your imagination here. The point is that the impact of an IoT on the average middle class house as they are built today is currently pretty small because neither the house nor the contents of the house were designed with an IoT in mind. Once we actually have an IoT houses will be build from the ground up with different assumptions .

At least, that is my opinion.

tl;dr: The IoT has a chicken and egg problem.

I still don't see a compelling argument here. Who cares about having a "light show" in their house? What does that even have to do with the internet? We already have huge televisions that aren't very expensive. If we want the whole wall to be a TV, we can get a projector. A wall covered in individually-addressable LEDs is probably not going to be cheaper than a wall covered in televisions or just a big projector.

The question the parent was asking was "Why hasn't anyone shown me a concept that makes me think, 'Now I want an internet of things in MY house!'?" Not, "Why haven't I seen quick adoption of these IoT concepts out there?"

"Who cares about having a "light show" in their house?"

People do - "mood lighting" is already a thing, that is why we have dimmers on some light switches now. Going further than that we can change lighting color, create patterns etc.

Many people, including myself and my kids, would LOVE to have that in their houses.

But only if it was easy, it needs to come essentially for nothing, ie, to be builtin from the start.

"What does that even have to do with the internet?"

Internet Of Things I have always understood to mean "Things that we can talk to and control using our devices, possibly over the internet" but in terms of the internet as it is widely understood, not much really. I am not sure I understand the question?

"We already have huge televisions that aren't very expensive. If we want the whole wall to be a TV, we can get a projector. A wall covered in individually-addressable LEDs is probably not going to be cheaper than a wall covered in televisions or just a big projector."

Right, and who knows whether that specific leap of imagination is realistic, I certainly do not - but I was not trying to make you want a TV in your wall, or even arguing that it specifically was a good idea, it was merely one possible example to make a point.

"The question the parent was asking was "Why hasn't anyone shown me a concept that makes me think, 'Now I want an internet of things in MY house!'?"

Yes. and I was attempting to suggest that one possible reason is that our imagination is balking because we keep looking at what we have in our houses now - all of which is extremely functional and works fine according to our expectations and desires, which have been moulded by what is available and by what has always been available.

ie, we are looking at our existing house infrastructure, the idea of an IoT and saying "but the Internet Of Things is not going to give me a faster horse, so why would I want it?".

I think I am doing a bad job of explaining myself, so I will bow out :)

> ie, we are looking at our existing house infrastructure, the idea of an IoT and saying "but the Internet Of Things is not going to give me a faster horse, so why would I want it?".

I think again you're missing the point with this. An LED light show is a trifle, it's not something that will really affect you in any way and it's already possible with current technology. A cell-phone controlled LED light show is the faster horse. What the parent (and now, by extension, I) was saying was that I'm looking at the way an inter-connected house would look and I'm not seeing anything fundamentally new, just marginal and possibly dubious improvements on our existing technologies.

With Nest it's obvious that the appeal is that you'd have the ability to remotely change your thermostat settings, which is neat, but how often does that really come up? If I were to program my thermostat with my work schedule generally, how often would I really need the internet-connectivity? Once a month maybe? Is that really worth it? It's an improvement, but it doesn't seem like it's a whole new platform like you and other people are suggesting. Not yet, anyway.

>Internet Of Things I have always understood to mean "Things that we can talk to and control using our devices, possibly over the internet" but in terms of the internet as it is widely understood, not much really. I am not sure I understand the question?

I was mostly referring to the LEDs-wall, thing, which isn't inherently a networking problem any more than addressing each pixel in a television is a networking problem. If you're building a wall of LEDs for "light shows", chances are you'll just connect them all to a single controller anyway which can individually address each LED "pixel", and then that controller will be either plugged into your "internet of things" or it will be controlled by some physical panel.

The two big advantages of device connectivity are going to be that you don't have to be in the same room as your device to mess with it (not having to get up basically doesn't count, because we already have remote controls for almost everything), and that your interface with a device can be much, much more robust (you can essentially use your tablet or phone to give a full touch-screen UX to a small, cheap device like a coffee maker or a lightbulb). The first advantage seems to be getting a lot of hype because people can mess with things at home from when they are out, but that's a benefit that I find marginal at best (how often do I really need to interact with physical things in my home when I'm not even there). The second benefit is much more valuable, but again it is likely to be marginal, because chances are your major devices are ones where you don't actually need to change the settings (or replace parts, etc) very often, so it's a convenience maybe 2 or 3 times a year, not a revolution in the way we interact with our homes and devices.

In your last point you touch on something important - do we need a rich digital UI for everything? Is the dryer that has essentially an Android tablet embedded in it superior to the two knobs and a button my current one has? (And of that, I use 10% of my options.) Do I need yet finer control? I only have so much attention to give; no interface is more appealing to me. An appliance can be "smart" without having the trappings of computers, I hope.

And likewise, do we need an Internet connection in order for the object to be smart? If context awareness is the name of the game, there's quite a bit you can glean by being a physical object with a memory of how it's used, and beyond that, a local network.

The Drift lightbulb is interesting because it adds some smarts to a dumb object but doesn't add more I/O - it still uses a light switch and an LED bulb, and it isn't trying to get on the network. There are computers that are taking on the form factor of a light bulb, and there are light bulbs that are taking on the force multiplier of a computing device. The latter philosophy needs to be explored more.

> suddenly magic begins to happen

The magic of a tenfold increase in maintenance costs.

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