[seltzered_]

You didn't mention the smartwatch at all in your essay. As someone living with one (a pebble) daily for the past year, many of the smarthome needs have been extending into working with the smartwatch, and they don't have the painpoints you describe.

Just as an example - for changing volume on my pebble, i do this:

1) long-hold the up-button (i have this binded to an app called 'music boss' )

2) hit up or down.

3) volume changes.

There's similar apps for controlling smart lightbulbs, etc, and pretty much expect this to be standard case on android wear / apple watch / microsoft band / etc. in the coming months.

Is there a "multi-user" factor missing that makes a case for products like Senic Flow? Yes, but that wasn't addressed in the essay.

[twald]

You're right. I'm going to talk about them in particular in a follow up post. I wear a pebble as well and I used to use it to control volume. I see smartwatches taking a big place in smart homes. Our issues were that they were not a shared control, you still had to use vision as your primary sensor input, battery life, screen size and problems with connectivity. But I'm confident some of these issues will be resolved soon.

[erohead]

I like the idea of all of these things working together (phone, Pebble, Flow) to enable people to control their devices with whatever is available.

[seltzered_]

Yep. I'm really seeing a near-term future of using a touchpad or kinect-like device for control, but more importantly paired with the smartwatch for vibration feedback / engaging into a gesture mode. There's no hard rule that a watch has to only connect to a smartphone.

And if you look at the Apple's acquisition of Primesense (kinect-sensor folks) and upcoming introduction of 'Taptics' into the Apple Watch, my guess is that these things will work together.

I've been trying to prototype this as an experimental addon to my touch plugin thimbleup.com (and sure, I'd love to eventually make it work with Senic Flow too). Testers have noted making continuous gestures/controls need a bit of 'stickiness' to it -- something that makes the gesture feel that if you use it enough, you don't have to rely solely on your eyes. A smartwatch takes care of that if it can manage the battery-life of being a low-latency bluetooth mode to get feedback data quickly,