Home Sweet Home

In the future our houses will be smarter than we are. Using the Internet and wireless technologies, we'll control our homes' lights and heating, keep an eye on our pets, and scare the hell out of unsuspecting houseguests without ever leaving our desks.

I got a taste of what's coming thanks to the Shell HomeGenie, a toaster-size gizmo that uses its own 2.4-GHz RF network and your broadband connection to automate your home. My verdict? The future looks cool, and a little creepy.

Shell Games

I started by inserting the included Shell tutorial CD, in which a young man talked me through the setup process. He had the calm, reassuring tone of a munitions expert explaining how to disarm a bomb.

Two hours later, I'd disabled my existing Wi-Fi network (a must for installing the HomeGenie) and connected the HomeGenie gateway to an RF transmitter, my cable modem, and my PC. Then I tried setting up the wireless devices. Shell's $600 starter kit has a wireless transceiver to control lights or appliances, a motion-sensitive camera, a three-prong plug, and a contact sensor that tells you when a door opens or closes. For $35 to $200, you can add sensors that detect water levels, temperature, or motion, and one that controls your thermostat.

But nothing worked. So I called Shell's crack support team, which figured out I had a problem with my RF transmitter and solved it by pushing new drivers to my gateway over the Net. Then I reconnected my Wi-Fi setup.

After that, I was able to control devices and assign schedules to them with a few clicks on the HomeGenie Web site. I trained the camera on the kittens' food dish and captured grainy footage of them tussling over the last morsel of Friskies Fancy Feast. I set up a schedule that switched our living-room lamp on and off at 5-minute intervals, just to make my wife nuts, and I set the sensor to e-mail me whenever the front door moved.

Then I called my wife. "You just opened the front door," I said. "That's creepy," she said. "Are you trying to drive me crazy?" Well, yeah. Isn't that what husbands are for?

Real-Life Uses

But we saw an immediate practical application: to keep an eye on my ailing father-in-law so that my mother-in-law could leave the house without worrying about him wandering off. She could get a text message on her cell phone whenever he tried to step outside, and could then call a neighbor to look in on him. Or I could rig a motion sensor to crank the stereo full blast whenever our senile and incontinent dog tried to leave her mark on the carpet.

At $1000 or more to outfit a typical home, and $20 per month for the Web service, the HomeGenie is not exactly an impulse purchase. But it's still cheaper than most home security gear, and it's one of the few products that give you everything you need in one box. (If you want to control the thermostat, professional installation is required.)

And the next time you sneak to the fridge for the last piece of pecan pie, you'd better think twice. You never know who might be watching.

PC World Contributing Editor Dan Tynan writes the magazine's Gadget Freak column.