OTHER TECH

Special Delivery

Intel wanted to see how people who aren't particularly sophisticated about technology would use a connected home, one in which all sorts of digital files - including movies, music, snapshots, and home videos - can be accessed and transferred inside and even outside the house with ease. Why the interest? Because "once we learn how people use technology, we can create chips to help develop the future products people will want," said Eric Dishman, a social scientist in Intel's People and Practices research group.

Nothing about the Monty-Snodgrass house would make it an obvious makeover candidate. Situated on a quiet street in Tigard, Oregon, the cozy three-story home is surrounded with lush landscaping, meandering pathways, and a calming pond complete with waterfall and filled with Japanese koi fish. Drew makes his living as a landscape architect, and he designed the house and grounds to be a quiet haven for him; Chris, a 45-year-old real-estate agent; and their two sons - Max, 17, and 13-year-old Zach.

It's also where both parents work. Drew could usually be found in his basement office, hunched over site plans, while Chris was upstairs in her crowded ground-floor bedroom turned office, researching properties for her clients. The kids, meanwhile, were either in their bedrooms or in the basement, playing with their Xbox on a big, old Mitsubishi tube TV.

While the family was looking forward to the large-screen HDTV that Intel had promised, they got much more than that. By the time the Intel crew was finished, their home had been transformed into a high-tech showcase - the coolest house in the neighborhood.

In the family room, the 27-inch TV was history, replaced by a 42-inch Gateway enhanced-definition plasma set, a Bose 3•2•1 GS home theater system, a Web cam, and a Niveus AVX Media Center PC, with a Philips ProntoPro remote to control everything. The centerpiece of the family room's electronics, the AVX runs Windows Media Center Edition and has a video hard-disk recorder, a TV tuner, and a built-in DVD player/recorder. It offers TiVo-like functionality, allowing you to stop and fast-forward live programs. A full-featured Pentium 4 PC, the AVX also has a keyboard, four USB ports, an Ethernet connection for routing files throughout the house, and a 300-gigabyte hard drive.

The master bedroom has a Gateway Connected DVD player, which can stream home video wirelessly from the home network.

In the basement, a 57-inch widescreen Toshiba rear-projection HDTV, joined to a Gateway FMC-901 Family Media Center computer, became the new display for the Xbox. While the small bedroom TV remained, it was now hitched to a Gateway Connected DVD player, which includes a wireless 802.11g Wi-Fi card and router. The kids got new media-friendly computers, with Max using a Dell Precision 360/MT PC, complete with two flat-panel monitors for doing video editing, and Zach using an all-in-one Gateway 610XL Media Center PC.

Tucked away in a closet is a Linksys wireless router that allows the family members to use their computers anywhere in the house.

Both Chris and Drew now use wireless Dell Latitude D600 notebook PCs in their offices, and they can work anywhere in the house thanks to an 802.11b Linksys wireless router tucked away in a closet. Also, everyone in the family received a Samsung SPH-i700 cellphone, which doubles as a pocket PC, personal organizer, MP3 music player, and camera. And the family calendar is no longer on the fridge but on Microsoft's Web site, ready to be accessed by the Toshiba Satellite P25 notebook PC in the kitchen - or any computer anywhere.

The house is now one big network, with wired and wireless technology connecting every PC and TV to each other, the Internet, and the family's digital cable service. Video can be watched not just on TVs but on PCs as well, digital music and photos can be sent to any room without using wires, and wireless Internet access is available everywhere. The long DSL cable that graced the home's staircase has become a thing of the past.

Max uses a Samsung SPH-i700 cellphone, which also functions as a camera, music player, and pocket PC.

While the family received lessons on how to use all their new gear, they weren't told what to do with it. Intel wanted to see how creative they'd be with the technology, not how good they'd be at following orders.