Slashdot Mirror
Digital Lifestyle
Gingerman writes "The BBC is running a story about a full automated lifestyle centre in Wokingham UK. The centre has everything from the home to the office and includes shops too." It's
a little thin on details, but its a mix of practical things that could
be around the corner, and stuff that may be a little further down a 6 lane interstate.
For instance, my two year Mac G4 running OS X...
* Comes with built-in speech recognition and a large bundle of applescripts to automate a large number of tasks via voice commands. Plus, it is fully applescriptable (of course).
* Comes with built-in Macintalk, and will read out aloud any text in a number of voices, and even in Spanish, if you select one of the Spanish voices. My favorite is Victoria, who actually has a pretty seductive voice.
* Runs IBM's ViaVoice for OS X for dictation/word processing
* Has a $40 Digital Media Remote for OS X from Keyspan that can control any application from across the room via out-of-the box mappings and is fully extendable via Applescript
* Features industry-standard DVI connectors for hooking up to monitors such as the 50" NEC 50MP3
* Features 2 FireWire ports for hooking up to the newest audio receivers/amplifiers out there
Quote: "I'm waking you 30 minutes early"
Anything that does that is clearly the Spawn of Satan's Spawn.
"The important thing with this is that the web becomes the hub," explains Mr Burwood.
...as well as other web-centric ideals. Is this it then? The all-encompassing "Internet" has finally been superceded by the ever-evolving, designed-for-hypertext "web". Or I could just be too pedantic.
What distresses me more is the banality which this vision of the future holds. "And on a Saturday afternoon, all it does is monitor the football results for you." Oh woohoo and other saracasm. Sure, there's plenty of talk here about how IT can make everything "easier" (and I'll believe it when I can put my hands through its sides), yet nothing about how we can reach out and achieve new experiences, interact with people and ideas that we never thought we'd even dream about...
"Underlying all the elements of CoolTown is the potential of the internet to affect people's lives."
Time to fulfil the potential, not mould it into the pap of society that seems to extrude from every firewalled port at the moment.
We see one of these things every few years, and only a fraction of the tech makes it into reality. Cooltown doesn't even seem to have any thing new in it, just the same old ideas rehassed over again. Hometime used to build a house of tomarrow every couple of years on their show. It would be much more interesting if someone built a modle home that had actual, realistic, tech built into it. Not a house that would warm the gararge 30 min before you got home (Billy Boys), but something that was helpful like an intigrated network for voice/data/whatever, smart lighting that turned on when you entered the room (and saves energy by turning itself off), that sort of stuff. Build a house that is technologicaly advanced and doesn't cost $1mil.