CrunchGear

The only problem with home automation is that the only people who can this technology are ironically never home to enjoy it… I think that instead of focusing on the “home of the future”, we need to re-think where we are as a society and focus on the “life of the future”which is far more compelling.

Jon

Reminds me of the French film by Jacques Tati detailing our obsessions with futuristic machines and material possessions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_Oncle).

I always love looking back through magazines and books that predict the future and see how things have changed. Its eerie how many of these things eventually do turn out to come true. Well I guess its not that eerie cause obviously there is a demand and need for the products and someone has to just come up with it.

This commercial from AT&T from 1993 is wonderful and shows how they predicted a lot of the products that we use nowadays. Unfortunately for them, they never made them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8&eurl=

Amit

I’m still waiting on my hover car.

Hover car? I want a hover board.

I 2nd the hover board! I’d love some sort of home automation, but agree that it can’t be gawdy. Just cause you can do something, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’d be neat to have a circuit breaker that “knows” when something’s been on too long (like a toaster oven, coffee pot, hot rollers (my wife is notorious for leaving them on))…so that the place doesn’t burn down. Chances are, there’s probably something like this at Home Depot right now. :)

AT&T commercial from the ’90s? I saw a clip from BellLabs in the 60’s with a prototype of video conferencing. At that time the accepted time from vision to market acceptance (not entry) was approximately 25 years. I know that a number of items went through market acceptance in the last 5 years; anybody have any idea (facts please?) of when the original concepts were prototypes in a lab??

Jon -
But that’s what’s so good about home automation. Imagine a sub $1000 system that can save you that much in heating and electricity bills in around a year. Wouldn’t you be interested?

“That’s Canadian”, your talking to a Canadian who is about 2 months away from moving to Tropical Australia for a very very long time… and you want to get me into a discussion about heating my igloo and the electricity my winter blanket is eating up? You my friend are evil! ;-)

I look forward to being roasted like a lobster for years to come, with the only snow being found in my drink and making electricity the old fashion way with somebody I love.

Jon

I believe better automation would allow people more time to do other productive tasks. Already my coffee is brewing in the morning for me and my room gets vacuumed for me. Imagine even more automation, cars driving themselves so that you can work on the way to work. One day my friends, one day.

Amit

If automation will be as good as the spec then it is a very good advancement
but usually technology not always bring comfort