I don't want to pay for them but I do wish I had automatic windows. It would be so nice if my windows automatically opened if the temperature outside was a few degree's cooler than my house and I was in "cool" mode. If it took the wind into consideration, even better. My house cools off so nicely when I open windows on opposite sides, but I have to remember to open and close them at the appropriate times and I have to be around to do it.
Automatic windows seem hard, but you can accomplish this "easier"(not super easy, but doable if you are a home DIYer) by having a "whole house fan" + a make up air unit(basically a vent that opens up when the fan turns on, supplying outside air to replace the air the house fan takes away).
Fairly common to see here in Boulder and the front range in older homes(before ubiquitous AC units), because it tends to be cool at night + hot in the day during summers, so around 5AM you can have the house fan turn on, cool your house, and then you ride that throughout the day until the evening when the temperature starts to drop again. Works quite well IMHO - my first rental had a system like this as well as AC, but I actually never touched the AC.
They also had a bunch of other adaptations for better Summer airflow. Large, open attics with multiple windows or vents, open to the lower floors (no doors in the way), to help hot air go up and out; high ceilings (an aid, not a hindrance, to cooling, if you're not using AC); floor plans and house placement that took prevailing winds into account; larger windows for better airflow when they're open, and usually on all sides of a house, roughly symmetrically (look at modern houses, lots of them have at least one side with no windows); big, straight, end-to-end hallways to let air blow through; and so on.
AC cooling efficiency requires abandoning several of these, and others are simply not given much thought because they don't matter if you're using AC all the time anyway. Which is unfortunate, because it shrinks the parts of the year in which going AC-free with windows open is viable.
Adaptive vents, too. Why cool the whole house when I'm going to be in two rooms for the majority of the (hot) afternoon before opening the window to the bedroom in the evening?
I want floor vents that are wireless networked, coupled with occupancy, CO2, and temperature detectors. They should have the smarts to figure out when to open and close, such that rooms are never stuffy, and never too hot or cold.
If you setup water heater / cooled systems using the in-floor (sometimes in-wall) pipes, they get that almost for "free" - you can turn on and off zones very easily.
That's a fine idea when building a new house, but untenable for a house that is not being thoroughly renovated. My forced-air HVAC system is built-in, and replacing the register vents would run me under $2K at $100 a pop. Ripping up my flooring and installing in-floor heating would cost me tens upon tens of thousands of dollars.
That's essentially what zoning is, most commonly used to heat/cool different floors of a house separately without having to have multiple furnaces and AC units. If I understand correctly, you want the shut-off flaps or gates as close to the blower as possible for maximum efficiency—just shutting off the vents at the ends of the lines would mess with pressure and airflow in the rest of the system in undesirable ways.
