What if the inanimate objects in your house reacted to your movements? Your toaster, phone charger, even the nearest music system could sync with your habits. Objectifier, an interactive design project, is hoping to make that the reality.
Objectifier was created by Bjørn Karmann and uses computer vision and neural networks to teach artificial intelligence about the habits and patterned gestures of people in their living spaces. The idea is that Objectifier—a device stationed close to objects such as lamps, water boilers or record players—recognizes a person's movements in relation to what the object should be doing. For example, if a person lies down in their bed, the bedside lamp turns off by itself. If the person gets up, the lamp turns back on.
Interacting with Objectifier has been compared to "training a dog," and a user teaches the device only what they want it to care about. Hence, each device is uniquely accustomed to an individual's habits. If a person slides their mug to the right of the water boiler, for instance, it may turn on, but if they slide their mug to the left, it won't. As the video shows, it takes some time for Objectifier to learn these patterns.
Of course, there isn’t some magic connection between all your household objects, so the objects need to be connected to Objectifier in order to work. The objects a user wants to train plug into Objectifier (like an extension outlet), and Objectifier plugs into the wall. What looks like a simple wooden box on the outside, Objectifier combines computer vision with a machine learning algorithm. In doing so, people can cultivate their own unique relationships with technology and the objects around them. And that movie Smart House just got even closer to reality.
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from The 'Objectifier' Teaches Your Appliances to Work on Their Own
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