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| The Innoventions Dream Home is located in the heart of Disneyland's Tomorrowland section. |
As I sat there, my flight delayed at Chicagos
OHare Airport I
pondered the carbon footprint required to get me from Carmel, Indiana,
to Anaheim, California. I was on my way to attend the grand-opening
festivities for Disneys Innoventions Dream Home, and the only reason I
was going was because of my respect for the folks at Exceptional
Innovation whose
Life-ware brand was one of the core technologies in
the home and one that is increasingly more important to the custom
installation channel. Otherwise, when it comes to Homes of the Future
and Technology Dream Home tours, Ive been there and done that enough
times.
Forgetting for the moment the environmental
impact of my journey, I
found the exhibit in the heart of the Tomorrowland section of
Disneyland to be a notch above what most of us have seen over the years
from Life-ware and Microsoft at trade shows and special events. While much of the
Media
Center PC backbone and Life-ware digital secret sauce have become old
hat to me, the integration of this technology with such an abundance of
gear (especially a ton of HP digital photo frames) and some gimmicky
fun stuff from Disney, gave the home an amped up feel.
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| There were too many digital photo frames. |
What made the Dream Home, a collaboration between Disneyland Resort,
Microsoft, Life-ware, Hewlett Packard, and home builder Taylor
Morrison, stand out compared with the integration gems that weve all
become accustomed to seeing, were several special technical flourishes.
Among them were a game table of four 42-inch LCD monitors that via RFID
technology, would simulate the download of photos from a camera phone,
scattering them across the displays as if they were actual photo prints
being dumped from your hands. The really cool part, however, was that
each photo could be grabbed and manipulated, iPhone style, enabling a
sharing of vacation photos, for example, or a digital scrapbooking
exercise. The same RFID technology also encoded display case items,
like an Eiffel Tower statue, that when placed in the center of a
bookshelf, would trigger a digital collage of photos from Paris on the
wall displays.
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| She's not dealing blackjack. The LCD screens are showing "downloaded" photos from a picture phone. |
Another fun technology piece was an enhanced product from Microsoft
that enabled an actor in the Dream Home to stand in front of a mirror
and sample outfits that were stored in the homes server. It was a cute
feature that, while not that realistic for most homes, seemed like
something out of Disney movie or something that has already found its
way to retail sales floors.
Another fun area was the sons bedroom which featured a Peter Pan theme
that, when the story was read aloud by one of Dream Home's actors,
would trigger Peter Pan movie video images to project on the sail of
the boys ship-shape bed and facing wall and trigger wind chimes to
shake when Tinkerbelle flew past, etc. This was Disney magic at work,
but not really something that would appear in most homes of today or
the near future.
Despite these gee-whiz moments, the big message for the home didnt
really revolve around the future so much as technology that is
available right now or very shortly. The number we kept hearing was
that 65-70 percent of the technology in the home was available right
now, while the rest was future stuff. For Life-ware that number
jumped to 95 percent of available-now technology, their five percent of
future-looking technology being special RFID recognition programming
that triggered scenes and themes when tagged actors stepped into a
certain room of the house.
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| He really shouldn't be playing in his sister's room. |
My overall impression of the exhibit was that it will simply blow away
most visitors the will walk through it. Face it, most of your high-end
clients who already own Dream Homes of their very own, wouldnt be all
that impressed by what is on display at Disneyland, but then again I
cant picture most of your wealthiest clientele parading around in the
hot sun and waiting in lines for an hour to ride Space Mountain either.
This project is for the general population and most of them don't have
a clue that anything more than computers and digital photo frames even
exist.
This project, for those who invested months and years of man-hours and
a obviously a huge financial commitment, will be serving the greater
need for our industry to promote what we can do. The actors who
populate the Dream Home are encouraged to steer all tough technical
questions back to Dad who knows to direct all interested parties to
manufacturer websites who then direct leads to their dealers. Also,
Taylor Morrison has a kiosk designed to enable visitors to select
features for their own dream home, including the kinds of technology
that they would really like to see in their house. Demographic data
from these surveys will be collected, and that information will guide
all participants in this project toward better solutions in the future.
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| The man of the hour, Life-ware's new VP of marketing, Bret Fitzgerald, in front of one of his control screens |
It should be interesting to see what they find out. People will either
be really excited and want to take out a bank loan tomorrow to buy this
stuff, or will be completely freaked out by everything they saw and
choose the "simple life" instead. I think they'll be pretty excited,
unless they're scared of clowns and "re-enactors" like I am. Then
again, if that was the case, they probably wouldn't have come to
Disneyland in the first place.