By Rob Pegoraro

Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page F07

REDMOND, Wash. -- The first big hint that something is different at 16100 NE 159th Ave. is the front door: It has no keyhole.

The wall next to it, however, prominently features a touch-screen monitor. Look into the black panel above it, and an iris scanner will recognize your eyeball's pattern of blood vessels, greet you by name on the screen and open the door. Popping a smart-card ID into the adjacent slot will yield the same result.

Visitors, meanwhile, can tap a button on the screen to ring a digital doorbell or leave a message.

Things only get more wired, and weird, once the door opens.

Microsoft maintains this "home" -- the address listed on that front-door screen notwithstanding, it's just a series of rooms in Building 33 on the company's campus here -- to show what might be possible five to 10 years from now. I toured the home, along with the rest of the campus, on a visit two weeks ago.

The basic idea behind the Microsoft Home is personalizing a dwelling so it responds to its occupants and their tastes -- "making things mine," said John O'Rourke, senior director of Microsoft's consumer strategy division.

So when the house learns that it's you at the door and not the FedEx guy, it knows to welcome you by opening the blinds, turning on the lights and playing the music of your choice.

Small touch-screen consoles on the walls allow fingertip control of those settings, as well as quick access to the images picked up by in-house cameras. For some reason, the clock on the first such console was an hour off.

The house also can be controlled by voice commands, but a Microsoft rep had to rephrase his command to get the blinds to open.

The family room's plasma TV -- like other sets in the house -- is a monitor that allows access to all the entertainment and information on the home network, including movies, music, photos and everybody's schedules, collected from such different sources as the computer servers at the parents' workplaces and a kid's Hotmail calendar.

The plasma TV also features this status report: "Grandma is having a normal day."

How did it know that? Because it talked to her home, which -- with her permission -- tracks her use of the computers there to make sure she's OK.

The microwave has a bar-code scanner, permitting it to identify the frozen foods you're about to throw in, look up their heating directions online and execute them precisely. When it's done, it can send a message to your phone or handheld organizer.

The fridge includes an "RFID" sensor that looks for the radio-frequency ID tags that are supposed to be included in the packaging of countless consumer items in the coming years (retailers like these tiny, cheap, durable circuits because they vastly simplify inventory management). This way, the fridge knows what's inside it.

Other kitchen gadgets share this capability. Place a bag of flour next to a food processor, and the food processor's RFID sensor will notice the new arrival and alert the home's computers. A voice then warbles: "Would you like some assistance?" (Yes, this reminded me of the talking paperclip in old versions of Microsoft Word.)

Say "recipes" and the system then dims the lights so it can project a list of flour-based recipes on the countertop -- and remind you that you're out of chocolate chips.

The home-office computer has its own smart-card slot; Mom or Dad can insert a work ID and be instantly logged in to the office's network -- and even have the office line forwarded to the home phone if desired.

This home has a media room, naturally, dominated by a wall-filling plasma TV and two Xbox game consoles on the coffee table (I didn't see any computing devices that weren't running Microsoft software during this tour). A "digital memory device" -- a sort of networked lava lamp that projects digital photos on the inside of a lighted cone -- stands in the corner, and banks of LEDs in the ceiling can change colors to match the mood of what's on the big screen.

To put it all together, one of my hosts gave an "enhanced" reading of the children's classic "Goodnight Moon," with pages from the book displayed on the TV and sound effects coming out of the speakers at the appropriate times.

The whole experience left me with the same vague unease I've had after visiting other houses of the future -- for instance, Philips's experimental home at its Eindhoven research campus in the Netherlands, which included things like Internet-controlled lighting.

I'm not worried that these dreams of home automation won't come to pass -- I'm worried that they will.

These networked-home systems will be reasonably priced, and they'll work fine during the in-store demo.

It won't be until you've had everything installed that you realize that the kitchen's automated inventory management doesn't work with the produce you buy at the farmers' market (and besides, the technology is not appreciably easier than just looking in the pantry). Your media server computer will think you're trying to steal a movie when you want to take a copy to a vacation house. When you add some other vendor's hardware or software to the system, things start to break.

Demonstrations like Microsoft's are fun and thought-provoking, but the entire computer industry needs to do a much better job of making its products painless to use before it earns the right to spread from one desk to the rest of the home.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.