Microsoft has a bold vision for what the future home will look like, and (surprise!) it’s full of Microsoft Surface-enabled devices.
The company released a video on Friday announcing its new Envisioning Center in Richmond, Va. The glimpse into the Microsoft-designed future is straight out of "Minority Report," although focused more on making multicultural recipes and reading stories with Grandma than catching criminals a la Tom Cruise.
Almost all of the surfaces in the future house are covered in Microsoft Surface devices. The walls are covered in screens on which you can give cool-looking presentations (look at all those graphs!) or design super-futuristic bionic robot hand on a massive Surface drawing table. Just click your smaller tablet onto it or your wall, and you’ll be able to create a drawing and slide it all over your future house, over all the different smart displays that blanket your future walls.
The video also shows a father cooking dinner for his family, while a “personal chef” on the kitchen wall teaches him how to cut carrots and walks him through preparing a healthy, vegetable-laden meal for his children.
But the most exciting prediction in the smart kitchen is revealed when the father asks his kitchen wall “What can I make with this?" and the kitchen responds by showing a dish with all the ingredients Future Dad has sitting in his fridge. If it can do something with individual hot sauce packets, a moldy orange and some sauerkraut — sold.
This glimpse into Microsoft’s vision for the future shows that the company is working to transform our houses into gadget-infused smart homes that allow us stay connected whenever and wherever we are. But this sleek new vision from Microsoft might be missing a more troubling side effect of a house made of touchscreen walls. If our new homes will allow us to work anywhere, moving our graphs and spreadsheets all over the walls, will this mean our work will follow us everywhere? Will work emails follow you around the house? Would a house like this allow us to work on every surface of the house, or would it force to constantly be surrounded by our work?
Paranoid Luddites aside, this Microsoft video does look really cool, and maybe putting up fancy work graphs and a chef that lives on the kitchen walls will accelerate us to a new golden age of smart phones. But we think there might be a few Apple smart walls (iWalls?) or an Android ceiling here and there in this future too.
(Edited by Lois Heyman)
