It's 2013, and you've just come home from work. As you pull into the driveway, you reach into your pocket and swipe the screen of your smartphone with your thumb. Your garage door opens and the lights in your house turn on. The TV queues up the shows you missed while you were working late. Your favorite songs are following you from the living room to the kitchen. Then you stop. The phone blinks and warbles at you. The fridge says you forgot the milk.
It's the HD/wireless/automated/streaming/sych'd/ready-to-entertain house of the future, and you're living in it.
Welcome home.
In the following pages, you'll be treated to a glimpse of the toys and technologies that will grace your home in the not-so-distant future. If you are like most people, you probably have already sampled some of them, but others -- such as automated home control and personal applications of cloud computing -- haven't made it into people's homes ... yet.
In a few cases, you may be forced to reconsider some of today's popular consumer technologies which will be headed toward obsolescence five years from now. To that end, there's a summary of technologies that are destined for the scrapheaps of 2013, including Blu-ray and standalone desktop operating systems.
So sit back, strap on your sense of imagination, and get ready to step into the digital home of 2013.
Table of contents from the Industry Standard special feature, Ten Technologies from the Digital Home of 2013:
- Introduction: What your future really looks like: The Digital Home of 2013
- 1. The Digital Home of 2013: High-speed telecommunications
- 2. The Digital Home of 2013: It's an HD world
- 3. The Digital Home of 2013: Gaming gets real
- 4. The Digital Home of 2013: Reach out and touch something
- 5. The Digital Home of 2013: Automated home control
- 6. The Digital Home of 2013: Green goes mainstream
- 7. The Digital Home of 2013: Welcome to the cloud
- 8. The Digital Home of 2013: The rise of streaming media
- 9. The Digital Home of 2013: Online distribution of TV, movies
- 10. The Digital Home of 2013: Collaborating across town, and across the world
- Sidebar: The castoff home technologies of 2013?
Comments
To make all of this happen some local computing resources will be required. Something like a Home Server with the functionality to manage the home network, stream and store local media, interface with Home Automation systems, etc. Take a look at www.Amahi.org - still in its infancy, but way ahead of anything else in this space!
I disagree with the streaming bit. Storage will get so cheap and so massive and not to mention downloading movies, music, games, etc will be far faster than streaming it without the hassles of poor performance due to network congestion, outages, etc.
Take a look at http://www.threshold.io
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