Gleaming hardwood floors. Recessed lighting. Computers gathering data on every flick of a switch, flush of a toilet, or opening of a cabinet. It's all in an apartment nearing completion in Cambridge, MA, that doubles as PlaceLab, whose creators say it's the world's most elaborate residential laboratory for studying how people interact with their homes. Packed with discreetly installed sensors, microphones, and cameras, it's a lab for prototypes and testing health-care systems, smart appliances, the latest environmental controls, and whatever else companies and academics want to study.

The 90-square-meter space is a joint project of MIT and Tiax of Cambridge, MA. While academic labs and companies like Intel, Philips, and Microsoft have been showing off smart-home demos for years, the leaders of the Cambridge project say this is the first one that's both heavily sensor-riddled and also an actual apartment where people will live, albeit as voluntary test subjects for periods of about two weeks. "Nobody has built a scientific instrument like this, to measure the complex interaction of people and technology," says Kent Larson, an architect and director of the MIT research consortium involved in the project. "You can only go so far in an academic or corporate research lab."