Ixonos touts ‘everything connected’ concept at Linuxcon

FINNISH FIRM Ixonos has introduced its Homeecho concept at Linuxcon Europe for connecting a wide range of hardware.

The idea is that you don't need to worry about compatibility and each device can use the advantages of the others.

Antti Aumo, VP of global solutions at Ixonos said, "Our vision is a world where hardware and software around you are doing fundamentally new things in an innovative way."

Homeecho entails all the devices you own connecting together via a peer to peer swarm. They can then access all the resources and capabilities of each from any device. For example you will be able to share files, storage space and processing power.

Once connected you decide which software you want to use and how the devices connect but ultimately it uses the Linux kernel. Between devices such as your PC, smartphone and tablet you could end up with nearly 10GHz of processing power.

Aumo said, "The long term vision is that this peer to peer device discovery would move into the kernel."

Some real life examples of how the Homeecho would work are that a film you are watching moves between displays as you move around your home, your TV lowers or mutes the sound if your smartphone rings until your call is finished.

It even includes your car and you could configure your Homeecho system to start preparing your house for your arrival when you are some number of miles from returning.

Overall Aumo believes the possibilities are endless and could help you use devices for more than what they're designed for. You could, for example, use a multi-room hifi system as a baby monitor, likening it to transformers.

Some benefits of the system include resource sharing, functionality, ease of use, higher level of context awareness, extreme flexibility and low maintenance costs, according to Aumo.

The good thing is that most of the technology already exists to make this concept a reality. The big problem is that operating systems such as Windows and Mac OS X need to be incorporated too. Aumo admitted that it could take 20 years to accomplish so we'll have to watch this space. µ