Glowing, talking walls will do your bidding

Nanotechnology - science at a billionth of a metre - and mobile technology could together turn the house of the future into something out of science fiction, according to scientists at the British Association science festival yesterday.

It started with television. Jim Feast of the University of Durham told the festival that the squat, ugly box of the family television set could become part of the wall, thanks to nanotechnology.

"Maybe curtains will become things of the past and we'll just switch from transparent structures - maybe glass, maybe plastic - to an image of our choice; maybe light bulbs will disappear and we will be able to select the level and colour of illumination from our glowing walls," he said.

The wall itself could become a picture of Hawaii, a television screen or a window. Householders could change the colour and intensity at will.

This new future grew out of experiments with tiny devices such as light emitting diodes. The first manifestation of such technology was a shaver display, but things would change fast, he said.

"There are all sorts of things that can happen, from simple lighting through computing, security labelling, getting rid of bar codes and checkouts in supermarkets - just wheel your trolley through a gate, it will be scanned and the cost will be deducted from your bank account - electronic noses, maybe, sitting in your fridge and telling you if anything is off, and so on.

"The list is only limited by one's imagination and in principle, all the things mentioned are possible already," he said.

Soon mobile communications would be small enough for a device to be built into a shirt, for example. "You could just talk to your collar, or something," he said.

"I think it's on the way, that sort of thing. It will happen first for pilots and military, where money is no object. It will come to the general public later."

Long before the walls of the house became sentient, the objects within it would be in touch through mobile technology. Nigel Linge of the University of Salford told the conference that he and colleagues were already working with the Greater Manchester police on a potential project called Crimespot.

In future objects would contain location detecting devices and it would be possible to track their movements remotely.

"Your television, video recorder and DVD player are normally close to each other. If these three pieces of equipment had a location detection capability then you could identify where they were remotely.

"Now you notice that the DVD player is no longer adjacent to the television and video. Is this normal? Yes, if we know that the DVD player has been returned to the shop for repair or taken upstairs.

"But what if we were not expecting either of these? Then maybe we have a crime in progress," Prof Linge said.

The project was merely to look at the potential of the technology, and the problems of devising computer programs that would learn from routine behaviour and make judgments about dangerous or threatening situations.

There were huge questions: should every device have mobile technology? Should householders pay for it at the point of purchase or through their home insurance? Would the police do the monitoring, or a third party?

"We are therefore creating a future in which your mobile device knows everything about you, including your current location to within a few metres, and what you are presently doing," he went on.

"Does this bring back memories of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Big Brother kept careful watch over everyone and, if you stepped out of line, whisked you off to room 101?"

In fact, the watchful house could keep an eye on people who needed extra care.

Stephen Hope, of Orange Communications, foresaw an observant house which could automatically fill the bath at the right moment, notice if a diabetic had forgotten to take the necessary medicine, or remind an Alzheimer's sufferer of his or her identity with labelled electronic pictures.

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