Future of Sensors and the Capabilities

Nest

I found Tom Ben-David's post on the Nest thermostat very interesting. I personally bought a Nest Thermostat (I believe his blog post incorrectly called the product a "Verge") this past holiday break for my parents household in Florida.

Screenshot of the web control for the Nest thermostat set up in my parents house:

When you think about a green solution, you typically won't think of just adding efficiency to your system. However, this is EXACTLY what the Nest product does. Nest claims (in their white paper) that the average savings of a Type 1 user (as I would classify my parents), would have the average Anual savings of approximately $200/year in Miami. With the total price of a Nest at $250, this is a payback period of approximately 1.25 years. This is a much faster payback period than other green energy solutions (Windmill is somewhere between 3-8 years with a much larger initial investment). Overall I think we will find more solutions like this in the near future. A future where we use data and sensors to make smarter (and greener) decisions. These decisions will increasingly also be made by a computer such as Nest.

Leap Motion

Another type of sensor I am very excited for is the type of sensor that changes the way we interact with computers. This is best seen in the Leap Motion (demonstrated in the following video):

Computers were originally built with a mouse and keyboard (which has worked well so far), as a means for telling the computer exactly what we want it to do. As computers are evolving, so must their input. Computers of the future will be able to use sensors (such as Leap Motion) to understand what you want done, and perform the task. This is radical change from the original use of a mouse and keyboard to give exact commands (imagine a world with no CTRL+C to copy, but rather a slight gesture). The computers of the future will be able to understand what you really want done, and do it for you. This will all require more sensors (such as motion, sound, and visual sensors) to replace standard interface.