Homes of the future -- today

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Every two years in the United States (and other years abroad), brilliant architecture and engineering students from around world build the houses of tomorrow, then show them off in the Solar Decathlon home design competition - and they’ve got futuristic features that will blow your mind. From a transforming house that splits in two, to houses that actually pay their owners, to furniture that pops up from the floor, read on for 15 next-gen features that could be coming soon to your home.

Exterior “curtain walls”

Why settle for a tiny window when you could open up an entire wall to let sunlight and fresh air into your home? Team Austria’s LISI house -- which was crowned the winner of the 2013 Solar Decathlon -- opens up to the outdoors with two massive sliding glass walls.

Movable solar shutters that track the sun -- as exterior walls

If you look carefully at the photo, each wooden shutter slat is covered with a photovoltaic panel that can be angled for maximum sun exposure, to generate extra electricity for the home while doing double-duty and shading the home.

A home that generates so much excess electricity it’s a money-maker

If you find it impressive for a home to single-handedly generate enough electricity to keep its essential operations running, get a load of this home that produces four times as much electricity as it needs to operate!

Gesture-controlled sound, lighting and entertainment systems

Gesture-controlled entertainment and lighting systems have just started to gain popularity in 2013, but did you know that students from SCI-Arc and Caltech were already experimenting with this type of technology back in 2011 with their super-futuristic CHIP house?

A home that comes with indoor wetlands to recycle and treat wastewater in the home

Equipped with its own artificial wetlands, the WaterShed House filters and collects rainwater for irrigation and other nonpotable functions and purifies graywater using natural microbes within the marshy plant life.

Modular shipping containers to change the shape/size of a home

Shipping containers are common and relatively inexpensive structures that are often stacked or placed at 90-degree angles to form modular homes. For the 2011 Solar Decathlon, students from China took the shipping container idea a step further by arranging six shipping containers into a Y-shaped home. The interior of the Y Container House has movable walls that can be slid into different configurations, allowing the occupants to use the various spaces in the home for multiple functions and reconfigure the home whenever they want.

Intelligent home automation system that “learns” from its inhabitants

We’ve come a long way from the Clapper. Homes will soon be able to learn from their inhabitants and automatically adjust lighting and temperature to suit their occupants’ lifestyles -- no claps needed! -- as the Stevens Institute’sEcohabit house also showed this year. A network of smart sensors monitors interior temperature, humidity and motion, and evolves over time to automatically flick off the lights and turn on the thermostat according the homeowners’ living patterns.

"Living walls” that create oxygen and filter the air

The Borealis House's dense vertical garden works day and night to cleanse the air of contaminants, processing CO2, and delivering fresh oxygen.  Who needs an air purifier when you have plants?

An expanding home that can be made three times as big in minutes

The DALE house expands from a cozy 600 square feet to 1,800 square feet by pulling two modules apart on rails to open up a breezy patio between the two modules.

A home that rotates to follow the sun

Powering your home with solar panels is a great way to cut your electricity bill -- but the efficiency of photovoltaics is greatly reduced when the sun doesn’t hit them at the perfect angle. Team Portugal's Casas Em Movimento House from the 2012 Solar Decathlon solves this problem cleverly.

Sliding walls

The rectilinear home is organized around a central bathroom core with sliding walls that open and close to create separate sections for privacy or open the whole house up for maximum airiness.

Home designed as an "organism"

Rather than try to control the home using mechanical systems, the student designers equipped it with smart sensors and passive design, allowing it to largely maintain its own organic equilibrium using as little energy as possible.  It’s pretty darn cute as well, resembling a pudgy high-tech critter!

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