Model of Future Home Offers Vision

A fully modeled home interior at Microsoft’s Executive Briefing Center in Redmond, WA, showcases the company’s vision of technologies that could enhance daily lives in the next decade. The display, often called the “Microsoft Home,” is built by the Strategic Prototyping Team, part of the Microsoft Research division, whose charter is to investigate technologies that are likely to have an impact on Microsoft products in the future. The Home isn’t open to the public, but is shown to some partners and customers, demonstrating fully functional scenarios that could generate business and technology development opportunities as hardware and software advances.

Tour Depicts What Life May Be Like by 2021

The first version of the Microsoft Home was built in 1994 in a Microsoft campus building that no longer exists. The original Home had a mandate similar to today’s Home and showed visions of on-demand television and music, an example of the Home’s foretelling of services that are a mundane reality today, but were compelling at the time. The Home moved to its current location in 2000 and is regularly revamped to reflect the latest research. The most recent set of updates were installed mid-2011. The Home is not intended to promote present-day Microsoft products or technologies: it is difficult to spot a Microsoft logo or recognizable Microsoft product anywhere in the Home.