What The Home Of The Future Will Look Like

This post is part of the Roadmap To The Future Series. Roadmap To The Future explores innovative industry trends and breakthroughs in science, entertainment, and technology. This series is sponsored by Verizon.

Flickr/andrewarchyOur homes today are smarter than they've ever been before, and they're only going to get smarter.

With the rise of products from companies like Nest and SmartThings — which make intuitive, web-enabled gadgets that adjust themselves — we're getting closer to a day where our homes do more for us than just give us a place to rest our heads at night.

We've also seen some other elements of the future home take shape, like web-connected TVs, home appliances, and sound systems that you can control from anywhere in your home using a smartphone.

There were about 821 million smart devices sold last year, with 1.2 billion expected to be sold last year, according to Gartner, so there's a huge opportunity to make our everyday objects smarter.

A new non-profit group, the Internet of Things Consortium, recently formed with just that in mind. Its primary goal is to help the makers of Internet-connected products and services collaborate with each other, and further grow the network-connected devices industry.

Given the IoTC's commitment to network-connected devices and the number of companies already working on home automation tools, our homes will undoubtedly go through some big changes in the next 10 years.