Visit momma's kitchen from afar, via PC and webcam
Prototype
I don't miss my mother's Irish cooking one bit, but I do wish I could join her in her kitchen more often. That's where she likes to hold forth with her priceless advice about child-rearing and updates on family gossip.
That need to feel closer to our folks is driving the consulting firm Accenture to develop a system that makes those human connections via broadband data connections. Called the Virtual Family Dinner, it transmits your life-size video picture and voice to a special display setup in your folks' kitchen, where you can join them for dinner. You will have to provide your own food.
At Accenture's Chicago R&D lab, a full test kitchen is monitored by a high-resolution camera and an Applied Intelligence system that determine whether mom is preparing a meal. When the system observes that mom has brought dishes to the table, the system concludes that supper is on, and it can open up a connection to your PC's webcam.
Your video picture is then rear-projected to a large display screen at the end of the table. There are no buttons for mom to push, said Accenture Technology Labs' senior manager, Dadong Wan. The Virtual Family Dinner's futuristic ''privacy window" display screen -- which is transparent when not in use -- automatically brings your life-size image to the table.
In its Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif., labs, Accenture is focused on developing smart home technologies that will support boomers who want to ''age in place," rather than getting shipped off to a nursing home by their kids.
The prototype system gives caregivers separated by geography insight into their elderly loved ones' health and happiness, Wan said.
''There is a desire for people to stay in touch with their family members," Wan said. ''The intimate moments are one thing lost in the traditional family setting as we become more dispersed."
Biometrics
Garage door opener recognizes your touch
My buddy Darryl once thought it would be nice to show his motorcycle to the teenagers in his new Boston neighborhood. The bike disappeared a week later. That's the kind of story that gets me excited about biometrics, the safety technology being incorporated into fire safes, keyboards, hard drives -- just about anything else that needs to be locked up.
BioMetrx (www.biometrx.net) of Jericho, N.Y., sells a couple of very handy devices based on its fingerprint-reader technology. One of them may put an end to mysterious radio signals opening and shutting your garage door:
The SmartTouch Garage Door Opener, a hard-wired unit that you can program to accept up to nine users.
And here's something for those trying to lay down the law after receiving the latest home gas bill:
The BioMetrx SmartTouch Thermostat also has a fingerprint reader, and should effectively deter the less cost-conscious members of your family.
Telecommunications
Here's a mouse that you can talk to
In the 1986 film ''Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," Scotty (may he rest in peace) clumsily tries to operate a computer by speaking into its mouse.
Now a group of Stanford University electrical engineering students have invented an optical mouse that you really can use to talk to your computer.
The YapperMouse, from Saratoga, Calif.-based YapperNut (YapperNut.com), doubles as a phone for users of the Skype VoIP service. The mouse-phone has a velvet finish and vibrates to alert you to an incoming call. To answer, you can simply turn over the mouse and talk.
The YapperMouse's $40 price tag had me kicking myself for having spent a lot more for my USB phone.
Then I learned that the YapperMouse would not work on my iBook. YapperNut has not yet written a Mac OS X driver for the device.
''I'm a Mac faithful," said YapperNut operating officer Ray Chen, ''but we just don't have the bandwidth to support two OS's right now."
Mark Baard can be reached at mark@baard.com
