Reality Editor lets you program and connect any object in your home

Reality Editor wants to make programming virtually any object in your home as easy as possible.

After three years of research at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Lab, the team have got a working iOS app that allows you to link smart objects in your house by drawing a line between them on the screen of your phone.

What that means is, if you have a Nest learning thermostat that has adjusted to your schedule and knows when to adjust the temperature, you could potentially connect that to your non-smart lights using Reality Editor so when the heat kicks in on a dark wintery night before you get in from work, the lights would automatically follow suit and come on as well.

Through the app you would need to connect the virtual circuit that controls your Nest to the one controlling your lights by simply tracing a line on your phone’s screen.

Of course, a lot of homes today don’t have any connected devices because the Internet of Things is still in its infancy in a lot of ways.

The team behind Reality Editor are working on solving that issue too though. They have also created an accompanying open source platform called Open Hybrid to encourage people to build a new generation of connectable devices that are compatible with Reality Editor.

At the moment this is done by creating a sticker similar to a QR code to use on the devices you want to connect but its creators say this won’t be necessary in the future. They are hopeful that image recognition can be built into the app.

Right now, if you have the smarts, you can use the iOS app and Open Hybrid to tinker with the devices in your home. Otherwise, it may be a while before Reality Editor seems like a viable tool given that no consumer devices are currently supporting the platform.

➤ Reality Editor [via Product Hunt]