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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and the fridge can provide you with recipes which use the ingredients inside, and let you know if your food is out of date.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
Complete with microphones and video cameras in your television sets!
"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
At a decent price (yeah, that'd be a while) this type of system would be great for some people with certain mental disabilities, including head injury with memory loss. Low level alzheimers perhaps? A health care aid is way overpriced for helping you with simple things like remembering what you need to buy or what you should wear, besides being awkward. Ideas like this might help "high functioning" disabled people stay out of group homes or nursing homes someday. So some people care, maybe not most people.
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".