Using the Technology of Today to Build the Computer Systems of Tomorrow

We have all seen the Digg and Slashdot posts about the technology of to morrow; airborn electricity, thought-controlled software, reports of new gamecontrollers to rival the Nintendo Wii and various others. I hope that this article will be able to bring together this entire technology into a—hypothetical, yet possible—system that could be able to control your home appliances and go out on the Web. The article will also provide links back to where the reports of said technology are online.

The system would use 2 main computers (one for redundant backup) and thin clients for controlling the various appliances. The thin clients would usesomething like Microsoft’s table top desktop [1] and be powered by electricity over the air.[2] You could also control the system with a remote of some description. Be this an RFID [3] glove where you touch your wrist with your fingers to move around the menu, or perhaps even some sort of thought-controlled headset [4]
You could use the same remote to control your various game systems with a virtual reality-headset [5] with some kind of glove like the “Immersion Cyber-Grasp”
[6] but, rather than just a glove, a full suit.


There are various articles out there about controlling your home appliances with various projects available, so I won’t go into those here, though I am going to speculate as to what problems using a system like this could cause. One of the main ones is that if someone from outside managed to gain access to the software, they could lock you into your home and deactivate all appliances, eventually forcing you to break in the door. If for any reason there is a power cut and your backup power doesn’t come online, you would be locked in unless a manual way of overriding the automatic lockdown existed. Computers brake down just when you don’t want them to do, so the system would have to be either really easy to perform maintenance on, or have an automated engineer-call-out system to bring help.

1 Gizmodo: “Video of Bill Gates Showing off His Expensive Table” retrieved June 20th 2007.

2 The Ottawa Citizen: “Tesla Theorized that Electricity Could Be Transmitted Through the Air Around Us and Directed From One Point to Another Without Wires as a Means of Delivery” retrieved June 21st, 2007

3 Wikipedia: “RFID” retrieved June 22nd, 2007

4 The Register: “Boffins Create Throught-Controlled Computer”, retrieved June 22nd, 2007

5 Wikipedia: Virtual reality , retrieved June 22nd, 2007

6 Inition: Immersion CyberGrasp, retrieved June 21st, 2007.

About the author
John Edmondson is an entrepreneur, working with standards-complaint web sites and web technology. He may be contacted via any of the following means: skype john.j.edmonson , admin (at) mumbles-uk (dot) com