Slashdot Mirror
South Korea's Home of the Future
An anonymous reader writes to mention a BBC article, looking at South Korea's vision of the home of the future. Their vision includes the use of many recent advances in interface technology, networking, and wireless communication. The difference? Unlike the high-tech demo homes we've discussed in the past, 100 of these units have already been built. Another 30,000 high-tech flats are in the planning stages, to be completed by 2008. From the article: "Here, everything is voice activated, and the fridge can provide you with recipes which use the ingredients inside, and let you know if your food is out of date. It relies on the food packaging containing radio tags, or RFID labels, which can be read by the fridge each time it passes through the door. In the bedroom your wardrobe mirror can tell you your schedule for the day, help you select your clothes — if all your clothes have washable radio tags compatible with the system — and keep you up to date with the weather and traffic."
and it must have made the cover of this month's Popular Science.
or maybe it's like HDTV and after YEARS (decades) of being heralded, it might finally be coming. still overhyped IMHO....
i disable sigs
Does it have a fallout shelter?
Won't someone please think of little 3yo Sebastion? Imagine what all those radio waves will do to his thin skull!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Can you play starcraft in it? Useless to Koreans if you can't!
One that doesn't require two people working 60 hours per week to purchase. One that has a yard wider than 10ft. Really, does anybody other the wealthy even care about a high tech house?
Complete with microphones and video cameras in your television sets!
Unfortunately the article didn't give an estimate of the price for one of these hi-tech homes. Would the average (or even the techie) find the incremental cost worth it? I doubt it. We now have much of this technology available to us in the U.S., but few people choose to buy it. The only big difference is that the hi-tech "flats" are being sold as a package deal, instead of the buyer needing to request the upgrades.
How much would such a home be worth to you? Would you pay the $50-100K or so that the extra features would likely cost? Considering the only way that my fridge would know that my yogurt is spoiled is if I told the fridge I just bought yogurt, it doesn't seem like that big of a convenience (who wants to type in everything you buy into a console on the fridge?). Also, do you really need fashion advice from a hi-tech mirror? I don't trust my own fashion sense, so I'm certainly not going to trust a computer's. My wife suits me just perfectly in that capacity.
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
"Fridge, list available meals."
"State ingredient search depth"
"Fridge, Level 5, 'hard-up-on-cash' level"
"Computing..."
"1 meal found"
"Fridge, show meals"
"Cheese. End of meal list."
Task Mangler
Who else can listen in on all this data?
We're too busy working insane hours to even care about all that stuff. If I lived in Florida with warmer weather, a large cardboard box would be more than enough home for me to manage with my hours. Posting this from my office on a Saturday night, btw.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
What makes it a home of the future? It used to be that the home of the future didn't involve the gadgets but the way it's built. Homes of the future used to be made of plastic, garbage cans, heat trapping foam, composite polymer windows. They were made robotically using polymer spray guns. By using advanced construction they were going to end homelessness and reduce energy consumption.
Now the BBC has declared a collection of gadgets that's bigger than the collection of gadgets you already have as a "home of the future". It could be a bunch of gadgets in an apartment, a bunch of gadgets in a car, a bunch of gadgets in a pocket, but since a large government has taxed for it and created a huge program for it, it's now called a "home of the future".
I don't consider these human-assisting technologies "for the future." Here are more important criteria than that: (1) being energy efficient (electricity and heat), and (2) being environment friendly (allow natural vegetation to grow around it especially in an urban setting, adapting to the landscape rather than adapt landscape to it).
I once had a signature.