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IBM's Advanced PvC Technology Laboratory
ShellDawg writes "IBM had this really nice article article which showcases their new pervasive computing technologies lab in Austin, Texas. Gadgets which let you control everything in a room from light bulbs (which have assigned URL's )to smart kitchen-tops to a wireless enabled car. There's even a refrigerator that has a display which projects an image of whats inside without opening the doors." I for one am the first to sign up for this. I'm tired of opening the door just to realize that I'm out of everything except baking soda and butter. Mmmm. Butter.
So instead of opening the door and letting the heat in, you have a light bulb going on inside.
I wonder what is more efficient.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Marketing nonsense aside, I think the technology this project represents is impressive. No consumer in the world would want it in their house, but it is a nice demonstration. If you want to turn a light on in the kitchen, 99.99999% of the world will do it with a light switch, not their refrigerator.
The other question about their setup is where is Jabber?
think i'll zap on over to IBM's patent server and register me this one
Patent #1292334 Technology for viewing fridge contents
Fridge has door through which user can perceive current stocks of food contained within. This is achieved through use of a clear silicate door substance (a "window").
This patent can be extended to include cupboards and any other sealed system which can be fitted with a window.
What a fine idea though, I wonder how much more the LCD+video camera implementation costs?
what is it with IT people and refridgerators?? By now I've seen 'glimpses of the futuer' with refridgerators being net-terminals, being able to automagically tell what's inside it, suggesting recipies, being a 'home communication nexus' (i.e. replacing notes and magnets with an internal email system), being karaeoke machines, displaying its contents, ad nauseaum. It seems, if it's doable on a screen, our refridgerators will do it. People, there's a _reason_ mankind invented desks, and desktop computers to put on them. Do you _really_ need to play Quake, surf for pr0n and check your stock portfolio in front of your fridge?
:)
Besides, I bet the screen will go all strange once the users start placing a few refridgerator magnets on it
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Lots of baking soda eh...? Is this taco's first concession that he's a crackhead?
I think we should be told.
enough to address every particle in the solar system
Geez, man, stop giving people ideas. Lightbulbs, hell why not address the bleedin' photons themselves.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
With my ocelot and the associated hardware My lightbulbs and outlets have a type of a URL (an address on the rs485 bus to be exact) And X10 devices have done this for years also (but at a really low reliability) I agree the technology behind it is neat, bt it is far from revolutionary... Building this into a light bulb is pretty stupid. Right now I can change a light bulb and all is well, with their design I would have to take the lightbulb to the server, register the lightbulb or program it, then replace the burned out unit... we do not need addressable consumables, we need the durable good addressable and leave the consumables the way they are... cheap and dumb.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...Al, the plumber, who is quite the whiz with computers. In just an afternoon he manages to get the lightning working.
Let me guess, Al is very tall, with an overdeveloped chest and biceps, carries a hammer and tells everyone to, "Just call him Thor" at parties.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
even better - smart pants.
See you, space cowboy...
Are they loosing it? That's the one thing windows IS good for.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I can see toasters and coffepot weeb cams with IP numbers. but light bulbs? Like we can't run out of IPV6 space fast enough already.
Uh, 2^128 = 3.4 x 10^38: IPv6 address space is BIG. We're not gonna run out of IPv6 addrs anytime soon. (Someone pointed out back in an early IETF meeting on the subject that this is enough to address every particle in the solar system. I haven't verified that math myself.)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Well Duh. I suppose I shouldn't have generalized so quickly. Not everything is kept in the fridge. I keep a catalog of everything I buy, including the non-food stuff.
:)
Sorry for the confusion.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Some of the descriptions are mine. The program I wrote, upon receiving a UPC code its not familiar with, query's the Internet UPC database to see if there's a match there, and if so, downloads the name, otherwise it prompts for the name at that time, along with cost and other information.
I'll post the source someday when its actually in a semi-functional state.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I have a barcode scanner set up next to my fridge so I can keep an inventory of whats in there. Its still quite buggy, but thats what a work in progress is, after all. :)
If you want to see, check it out at
http://206.54.177.105/cgi-bin/barcodehtml.cgi
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
*cough* wingate *cough* or if you're old skool, ftp bounce.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I took a tour of this lab last Fall. While it was impressive from a consumer usability perspective, the technical decisions they made were at times curious. Like Microsoft, IBM sees the home of the future as a collection of dumb appliances that are dependent on a big, smart server to operate. Microsoft sees the server as the Windows XP platform, while IBM sees it as some form of their Websphere application server.
So there were no peer-to-peer technologies like IEEE 1394 or JINI to be found in their lab. And no Bluetooth or X-10, either.
In fact, the connection technology of the future, if the PvC lab is to belived... is CeBus! Now, CeBus is mighty fine at what it does, and fits well into IBM's architecture where everything is controlled by a Websphere set-top box, but it is much more expensive than the competing technologies. Right now, I can't see anyone (except Larry) paying a couple of hundred bucks extra for blinders that go up and down at different times in the day.
Corby
At last, no more dreams of tentacles dragging me inside to a moldy fate...
Light bulbs should work behind a NAT too, bro.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
IBM is doing some interesting research and I expect some if it will be successful. I always like seeing articles describing research being done to investigate more fundamental technologies as opposed to specific product development. It is also to push their products, but that's OK - they have to pay their bills.
I think the research is exciting, but I wonder if it will product anything or anybody else would want to use? I've been interested in home automation since I owned an Apple IIe in the 80's. I had friends that did automate the windows of their home with motors in the 80's.
That said I see some problems. Looking at the buttons and screen of the car and the user interface of the virtual laboratory control makes one thing clear: IBM needs to get some "normal people" to augment their team of engineers. Wives, mothers, and daughters are a great source of input.
The Virtual Laboratory control interface is really slick looking. It just strikes me that from the screen shot I can't intuitively tell how to control things. I can't help but think of VCR's with the flashing 12:00 display J. It reminds me of some of the beautiful user interfaces for software MP3 players in the PC market. Some people get excited about the beautiful skins available for MP3 players. I use plain Winamp with the default skin. At a glance I can see the controls. I've tried other players, and several dozen Winamp skins. I still like to be able to find the stop, pause and play buttons. I did spend 4 hours making my desktop wallpaper though.
The technology is great, the research is great, but will anything come out of this that I want? I want products that perform functions I want, products that I find useful and do not need a course to understand.
So you have a fully digital life, next what implants to monitor your every move via GPS, monitor your heart rates, etc...? Oh wait that's already coming out next month...
[source]
What happened to creativity, are we all turning into the PC and the PC turning into a human?
Want Root?
I'm glad we're looking into new PVC technology... I need a pair of breathable black shiny pants for dancing. :)
;)
Though I'm not sure I want them to be pingable... or fingerable.
[TMB]
The interesting thing was that a friend at Intel told me there was a group some years ago that thought about doing the same thing with a garage freezer in the U.S., since the "deep freeze" American houses seem to have must be a good place to stick a server, and there's space in the garage.
Personally I wouldn't mind having a terabite in the freezer.. ouch just to save a week of TV and not worry about which channel when.
IBM has a pvc lab? Is this that "smart pipes" techology everyone has been talking about?
If you haven't read Steve Talbott's NetFuture columns, now is a good time to become aquainted. The premise of the column is responsible use of technology, especially when there are unknown consequences upon society, and there is a whole series of articles on ubiquitous computing. The earliest NetFuture article on ubiquitous computing is actually the best.
This looks like a marketer's version of the Georgia Tech Aware Home Research Initiative which is more about building a house that is actually smart instead of just blindly adding IPs addresses and remote controls to a bunch of household devices.
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I've NEVER heard of a college student using a deodorizer in the fridge. It'd be overwhelmed by the semester-old tuna sandwiches lying unwrapped next to the dirty dishes hidden in the back of the month-old melted ice cream tub.
It takes years for college students to realize that bathrooms and kitchens do not have a Mom Genie that magically cleans up up after them.
"...people would probably benefit more from a healthy relationship with food (cooking themselves with fresh ingredients)..."
Dude, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider cooking myself healthy, no matter what kind of ingredients I used...
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Were I in touch with the toilet that is humanity, I'd have flushed it long ago.
Mmmm. Butter.
I just got through watching Me, Myself & Irene, and if there's one thing to be learned from it, it's that skin lotion tends to work better, without being greasy like butter.
Make the switch today, Taco!
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They don't need to come over. http://fridge.kitchen.sparcv9.home
Didn't TOTL look into this a couple of years ago with Project E.U.N.U.C.H
-Paul
-Paul
www.lpbk.net - A complete waste of a domain name if ever I saw one
What happen when you DOS a lightbulb? Just wiat till script kiddies can blow every bulb in your house in under a minute.......and we've already seen a fridge with the blue screen of death *shudders*.........
I'm tired of opening the door just to realize that I'm out of everything except baking soda and butter.
When you're a college student, you know there's nothing in there except baking soda and (maybe) butter.
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#nohup cat
I can see toasters and coffepot weeb cams with IP numbers.
but light bulbs? Like we can't run out of IPV6 space fast enough already.
sheesh!
;-)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Gadgets which let you control everything in a room from light bulbs (which have assigned URL's )to smart kitchen-tops to a wireless enabled car.
How long until it becomes passé for hackers to make visitors to their home feel like they're in the Twilight Zone?
The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. - Jacques Bènigne Bossuet
I thought PVC was a type of plastic! ;P
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
*ring* *ring*
You: Hello?
Cracker: Is your refrigerator running?
You: Yes, why?
Cracker: Not anymore! HA! Y00 B33N 0wn3D, D00D!
*click*
-Phil
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, will be quoted out of context on
My oven has had windows technology for 20 years. It even has a light switch on the outside so the door does not have to be opened to turn on the light.
The truth shall set you free!
i would much prefer that I can set the image displayed on the door of my fridge - or even better my shower door...
would be great to be able to go to the fridge and see my delectable of the day, or take a shower with angelina jolie!
for fucks sake - ever hear of clear aerogel?
I hope this doesn't mean we've run out of useful things for technology to do.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
as I've heard from a friend that recently worked at IBM, this new 'house of the future' is very buggy and apparently quite insecure... one could literally crack into the house and play Poltergeist >;-]
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"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Oh yeah, I'm waiting for the light switch to get hacked and have the bulb start pulsing at 90Hz until it implodes or causes an epileptic seizure.
Ok, there's probably loads of ways to protect your house from being hacked like that, but the security won't be SOTA forever, and all it takes is one house being hAX0R3d into the ground to generate enough bad publicity to make a trip on the Hindenburg look nice in comparison.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I honestly don't see the point of having anything but my computer connected to the WWW (as opposed to setting up a home intra-net like X-10). I spend enough time at my computer that if I was going to order anything over the web (like, oh, food) it'd be quicker, easier and safer to do it on my PC with all of its security measures in place, than to use an unsecured connection from my fridge. -Seraph
"There's even a refrigerator that has a display which projects an image of whats inside without opening the doors." For fuck sakes, anyone ever hear of glass?
So the real question is, when is the population going to be tech savvy enought to use all this kind of stuff? The answer: As soon as the Microsoft OS that will invariably be running on it all stops crashing (NEVER).
Who cares about food, the useful part of the projection feature is that I can know if I have to run out and get beer without opening the door. Now if they could beam items out without opening the door (kinda like beam me up scotty), can you imagine the energy savings???
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
check out this Netfridge.
Its been up since 95'
but the guy recently bought a new fridge, so it may not be working yet.
http://www.hamjudo.com/cgi-bin/refrigerator
(That's if it's not already answered, by implication, in that how is the system able to show you what's in the fridge without the light being on...)
Seriously though, I think some of this is more useful than people suggest, not in any serious sense, but in the same sense as we get VCRs with "Quick 30 minute record" buttons and hand held radios with programmable change-station buttons. It's not that these things are important, or necessary even, it's more that these things are potentially useful.
I can see it now. I'm at the supermarket. I wonder if I have milk. I whip out the GPRS-enabled cellphone, log in to the fridge, and have a look.
If they could create a way I could log into a VCR or more intelligent TV recording device, I'd be even happier...
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Great, just what I need: people being able to come over to my house and see that my refrigerator contains nothing but three bottles of Dr. Pepper and four gallons of homemade chili.
This is not a Fugazi
While watching foodtv, i can push a button and order all the ingredients for a tasty looking dish (a food dish, not a female). The ingredients are delivered by a PFY and put into a bin in the front of my house and transported to the fridge. Then when I am ready to make the dish, the recipie is projected in front of my food workspace.
But wait, that will cost a lot of money. I can log on to ye ol' internet, go to the foodty website, print the recipie, take that to the store and buy my own ingredients and not depend on one PFY to pick out the best stuff. Then I can have the recipie in front of me while I make it.
as to knowing what is in my fridge... 99 bottles of beer in the fridge, 99 bottles of beer...
It's not that bad if it's double glazed. I mean we have one of the display Coca-cola fridges that shops use, a shop down the road from us was throwing one out and we 'liberated' it. I'll tell you what though, those things are f**king heavy, the four of us had bruises for weeks afterwards. Anyway, the point is, it works (after a little repair), and considering that people aren't always opening and closing it to see what's inside, it does work rather efficiently!
It's huge too, so we can stokepile lots and lots of cold beer... mmmmm... beeeer
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Hollywood representatives have publicly stated that skipping commercials is "stealing."
- And all these devices are navigable
from everywhere else, meaning they can be controlled from anywhere in the
country via a cell hone.
- Retail
applications include remote purchasing transactions between the home and the grocery or other retailers.
- You
could check the fluid levels of the car remotely with a pager, or transmit
data from the car to car dealers for service checks.
There is a reason why they call them "internet enabled" appliances.Why am I not surprised to learn of Cmdr Taco's love of butter.
Connect your fridge to the Internet so 3l33t script kiddies can hack it!
Searchin for vulnerable fridges....
Connected to 127.0.0.1
Escape character is '^]'
FRIDGE OFF
250 Fridge is turned off
Maybe Perversive Computing might be more accurate.
okay, the GPS that the rental car company was using to track the speed people drove (and fine them) is bad enough, but can you imagine how this will be abused?
Your mother could check up on your fridge...
"Tim, I see you have only beer and baking soda in your fridge... Buy some damn vegtables!".
Even worse, the government could get involved...
Keep the Democrats out of my fridge!
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
One of the bigger questions of life.
Between Heisenbergs Principle, and Schrodingers Experiments on a cat, we have never been able to know.
Until now, that is.
When you close the door, is the light on or off?
Thanks IBM.
Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
It'll be a 2 month project before the fridge is up and running, and grandma retrieves the old oil lamp from the attic, sho she won't blow her household budget on candles.
Friendly neighburs will pop in and help out now and then, amongst others Al, the plumber, who is quite the whiz with computers. In just an afternoon he manages to get the lightning working. Just too bad he broke the links to the fridge.
And the holiday season is getting closer, so the designated webmaster prodigy is now busy programming the christmas tree. Grandma never really cared for disco, but now she'll get a peek at what she missed.
She's a open-minded soul, so she doesn't mind all the cusswords being inprinted on her toast every morning by script kiddies. Also she keeps her cool when FBI busts in one evening to confiscate her washer and dryer, which allegedly had been used to break into pentagon, as well as hosting a web site poking fun at General Motors.
She only gets upset when her electric tea kettle gets the "blue screen thing", and she won't be able to serve those nice FBI agents some nice tea.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I realize the bandwidth is constantly increasing... but with all these internet-enabled "appliances," how much extra traffic is caused? and is it really necessary? I mean... the day there's a blackout (California comes to mind...) you can't even go into the house because the front door won't open? it will be geeky, but I don't think _everything_ needs to be controlled via electricity...
Well obviously the light goes out when you close the fridge door, so the web cam has to take an image before it closes and then show you that. Duh.
Some of them make a lot of sense: remote access to temperature and lights in the home can be useful. Others don't. For example, I don't think more automation in the kitchen does much good: people would probably benefit more from a healthy relationship with food (cooking themselves with fresh ingredients) than minute tracking of soft drinks and junk food. And short of automated driving and road following, I don't really need or want any additional gadgets in my car.
Really, this lab that they have on display seems to be really overboard. Who the hell wants or needs all that information at that exact moment and at that exact place? Seems to me that people are just getting lazier (or IBM is encouraging it). I guess that's what you get when you get a bunch of fat, lazy intellectuals together to design "the home of the future." That one guy that was sitting in the automotive prototype looked like he could use a couple of laps around a track to me.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
This is a nice modern convience. Just can't wait until hackers figure how to start switching off and on my refriderator though.
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Insert Witty Remark Here ===>____________________________
I have a imbedded linux chip in my fridge here at my house. It monitors the temp, if the door is open, and there si even a pressure sensor I set to monitor how much milk is left. I have MRTG and cricket set up and SNMP is set to page me if the door is open for more that 5 minutes. I have it firewalled off, but I might try to make something public.
Who you callin' an ass clown, cuntface?
Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of useful applications for have a computer in your refriderator. However, I thought they were integrating the two products so they can reach massive speeds (10ghz-100ghz). Think about it, Custom cooling solutions for PC's can be pretty expensive. Why not build a computer with a cooling system that you can use to chill your food too :)
-Jason