The Future is Now
photo courtesy of manufacture
Savant’s Rosie Surface, the same technology that makes your iPhone’s screen respond to your fingers’ every swipe, also comes coffee-table-sized.
Picture this: You have a teenage son who chronically oversleeps.
Trouble is, you’re often out of the house before he is. Wouldn’t it be great if you could set his alarm clock from some remote location? If the sound of his favorite music doesn’t rouse him by, say, 7:15, the lights in his room gently begin to undim. Five minutes later, up come the shades, automatically. Blinding sunshine won’t do it? After 10 more minutes, the music switches to something he despises (a little Wagner might be appropriate here), the volume increases and the bathroom’s heated floor comes on (you still love him, after all). The torture stops as soon as he gets up and turns on the lights in the bathroom (ensuring he’s actually out of bed).
That scenario and countless others are possible with today’s home-automation systems and the experts who program them. Once in place, certain systems can be as intuitive and sexy as your iPhone, which is no coincidence. Home-automation systems, long dominated by PC platforms, are available with Mac-based operating systems as of last year. And as with the iPhone, Mac programmers keep rolling out one cool application after another.
Is international business your thing? There’s an app that converts the front page of the Financial Times (or other newspapers) to spoken word and plays it through your bathroom speakers as soon as you turn the lights on. (Even cooler: You can choose the reader’s accent; a lilting Portuguese might be nice in these difficult times.)
That example is made possible by the Mac-based Savant system. As Chad Weuve, owner of Ambient Technologies in Aspen, says, “I’ve been in this industry since 1988, and I’ve gotten used to cool technology. But Savant changes everything.”
There are plenty of practical applications, too: Viewing security cameras and CO2 monitors through your iPhone from almost anywhere in the world, making sure the sprinklers don’t turn on when it’s raining and almost anything else you can dream up. To get a sense of just how specialized an automation set-up can be, pop into Ambient and ask Weuve and his crew about their powder-day wake-up call for skiers. It’ll blow your mind.
