THE country that gave the world the reality TV show Big Brother is about to lock a whole lot more people into a house and subject them to 24/7 video scrutiny. But this time it isn’t for prime-time viewing. It’s because Dutch electronics company Philips believes previous tests of “homes of the future” have been done the wrong way.
The traditional method for trying out new consumer technologies is to get people to live with them for a while, and then ask them how they fared. But Philips believes it will be much more useful to watch guinea-pig families in…
