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Speak, and it will listenBy Times staff
You say, "Hi, I'm Sheila, I'm home." And a future Moxi system would say, "Good evening, Sheila. You have four phone messages, four instant messages and a couple of e-mails, and there's an urgent message from your son." So you can have all these cool things all wired together. . . . Then when it's time for entertainment, you sit down in the living room. With the one remote control you turn on the set, or part of the plasma screen at that point. Immediately the sound comes on, surround sound, through the wireless speakers that are in the room, and you go and sign in for who you are. So now it's Billy (the son) who signs in, and the user interface is focused around what interests him. He's into motorcycle races, action movies and anime. And all the new stuff relevant to that comes in. It also tells him he's got a bunch of instant messages. A couple of his friends are online right now. It also tells him that there's going to be a concert of his favorite rock band coming in. It knows that some new music just came out and it has free samples for him to listen to to see whether he wants to buy them. It all comes up right on the screen, you click on things and they just play. Everything is on demand, and everything is where you want it. So Dad comes home, and he really wants to sit in the living room and watch Masterpiece Theater, or something like that. So Billy goes off, gives the TV to him, Dad clicks in, signs in as "Dad," and the menus change and the preferences and the samples and recommendations come in for him, and he gets to enjoy his stuff, all working with surround sound, with no complexity. Then Billy goes up to his room where there's a little plasma screen and there's a surround sound system, and he picks up exactly where he left off. The show he's watching is paused where he left it and he picks up exactly where it is. The instant message session he had with his friends continues on from there, while he's sitting on his bed and watching it. Meanwhile, his sister, Sally, is hanging out on the back porch. It's a nice evening. She has her laptop with a wireless connection; she's surfing the Web. Again, instant messages come in because it knows where she is; she's going and looking up some stuff and so on. Meanwhile, Mom is reading a book and wants to listen to some Beethoven. She's hanging out in the master bedroom, just sitting up in the bed. She had pulled out her little Palm device, her Handspring or her (Windows CE) device and touches it, and music plays in surround sound around the room. And it has all of the music that she'd be interested in coming right up on her Palm screen, all running wirelessly. A phone call comes in, and based on the Caller ID, they know it's Mom's mother and so the speakers in the room mute the sound and ring, and say, "It's a call from your mother. Would you like to take it?" "Oh, yes." Picks up a handset and there is her mother -- on a little video screen because her mother has a Moxi as well -- talking to her and they're having a phone conversation with video telephony. And all that stuff is going on simultaneously. At no time did anyone have to deal with any of the complexity of it, worry about which remote control it is, what mode things are in, nobody had to do any wiring, nobody had to figure out what format any of this content is, no need to worry what channel it came from. Everybody got the information they wanted to, the whole house worked, communications, messaging, video, music and so on. And it's all happening wirelessly and it's all very, very inexpensive. That entire system I described to you, if you added up all the components together, would probably cost -- not counting the plasma screens -- about $800.
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From Tech Times
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