Especially after the new Iron Man movies, everyone wants the tech in Tony Stark’s house. You wake up and you’re just connected, every piece of glass acting as screen aware of your entire digital footprint. A look at what Microsoft calls Future Vision shows that we’re not the only ones who think it would be cool.
If you take the idea behind cloud computing and put your sci-fi hat on, you see a world where everything you interact with is aware of you at all time. Your schedule, your interactions with other people, and your desire to look at specific kinds of information at certain times of the day. You want to wake up and see the weather, the news, and know that you have everything you need in the house to try out that new omelette you saw in that food blog last night.
Right now, in order to imagine this kind of thing, you have to remove the reality of current generation hardware because otherwise it’s not possible. But Microsoft has released a video showing off what they call the Envisioning Center to bring focus to the technology needed to make these kinds of things happen.
Microsoft’s shift to a touch friendly environment was more than just a guess at what users would want moving forward. The company has created a research team that is working on using full body interaction, like Kinect allows, alongside direct contact data elements.
In the video you see a young child sitting in bed interacting with a screen, while another takes a tablet and presses it to a screen to share information. These are concepts that are easy to grasp by looking at them, but so far there’s not much beyond a concept available. You can see the way Microsoft’s technology could evolve to support these kinds of interactions, though.
We’re still a pretty long way away from seeing these kinds of technologies widespread in our homes. As we look at Bill Gates and his Perceptive Pixel, which is going to be out of reach for a little while, the words Future Vision start to set in as a kind of expectation for whole house integration. Microsoft says five to ten years in the video, which is exciting but far from concrete. Still, it’s never not fun to walk around and pretend that you’re Tony Stark.
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