By Melissa Tan

IMAGINE this hypothetical day. You leave the house for work and belatedly realise you've left the fan on.

But no sweat - you log on to a Web portal where you can see live video footage of your bedroom, and click on a placemark over the image of the fan to turn it off.

You've also left the clothes outside to dry, secure in the knowledge that a machine will bring them in if the sky turns grey. And when you get home, the lights promptly turn on without having to lift a finger.

With the various IT tools and platforms already available on the market, this vision could soon become a reality.

A student team from Nanyang Polytechnic has come up with a Web-based 3D application that allows users to control appliances in a building remotely.

Users can also set the program to automatically adapt to weather conditions.

Called 'Green Remote Estate Network' (GREN), this program - written in just 24 hours - enables users to save energy in more ways than one: they can more easily cut down on electricity usage. For their GREN application, the team won the open category grand prize in a 24-hour programming contest called code::XtremeApps:: that was organised by the Information Technology Standards Committee (ITSC) in late July.

Team member Kishan Manokaran said that the team aims to expand the range of controllable appliances from lights, fans and PCs to 'printers, escalators, lifts and so on', and eventually commercialise GREN.

'We are closely working with our teachers on . . . making sure we can achieve something that can really be used by a lot of buildings. If anyone wants to buy our stuff we would welcome them,' Mr Manokaran told BizIT.

ITSC council member Harish Pillay said that the committee did not have the 'bandwidth' to facilitate tie-ups between teams and industry players, but invited interested firms to contact ITSC.

Teams participating in code::XtremeApps:: had to use at least one of three different programming platforms: GermaniumWeb, a 3D tool created by homegrown firm G Element; Red Hat's open source Java application server JBoss; and Microsoft's Project Nimbus, a platform that lets users access hosted information like meteorological data.

ITSC chairman Robert Chew said that the choice of GermaniumWeb was to 'give the competition a stronger local flavour'.

At the award ceremony on Thursday, mobile operator M1 also presented the Best Mobile App award to another team from Nanyang Polytechnic, which designed a mobile application for the sharing of images and descriptions of 'green' locations such as recycling bins and Salvation Army branches.

This article was first published in The Business Times.