Dad, I Want a HyperRoom !! Next Steps in Leadership
January 22nd, 2009 by Gordon Cook
Jaap van Till is another inventive Dutchman. See his article in the January 2009 Cook Report. On the Economics of IP Networks list he has come out with a new most interesting proposal.
“Last week I introduced in Holland the idea not of a new device/gadget, but of a cluster of gadgets which I call a “Hyperkamer” in Dutch or “HyperRoom”. My intention is that students and teachers get a serious number of tiled flatscreens on a wall in their room at home, a VolksWagen-version of the OptiPuter screens and networks with which scientists are experimenting. These are all controlled by App’s on a smartphone, by pointing at parts of screens for TV, virtual models, games, documents or manipulating images on the screen wall in total. The smartphone can also be used in-house to control all other gadgets and boxes in the room and all electric functions in the smart home as well. In essence, the ultimate single remote device for the complete house. And everyone in the house has got one, to boot.”
“The name comes from the fact that the present NetGeneration (age 13- 30) is already HyperConnected, intensively using more than four online communication gadgets. The essence of my idea is that students in their HyperRoom can interoperate these gadgets and can learn and cooperate with lecturers and team member students in their room and at multiple locations simultaneously. By manipulating the info on the screens together, they can create economic value, synchronize and synthesize their different contributions and visions for projects and mashups to design assignments, products and new solutions. I have asked the Netherlands government to fund a project (het HAN Hyperhuis Project) to let my smart multi-talented students at the HAN University in Arnhem near Amsterdam define and design such a multi-user networked virtual creative class environment for energy efficient use in their own rooms at home. I can imagine that Apple and Google might help fund this project too. Maybe this is the metaphorical Car of the Future? It is not hard to imagine that the Oval Office will be a cool and well connected HyperRoom soon, too. A room with a view indeed. Why does this professor do this dreaming ? It is the least we can do to help Steve Jobs stay connected while recuperating and…… I want one myself, don’t you?!”
Cook’s Edge - makes sense. It syncs with Harvey Newman’s comment from the same January issue that “Even in the days when walls of your home are live displays (the walls themselves, as extensions of current OLED developments, not just screens), it will be the knowledge behind the images, and the ways they are used to inform and educate, as well as entertain, that will matter most.”
John Waclawski has been eloquent about the need for communications interoperability of all manner of networks in the home…. and scathing in his comments on standards groups as too often bastions on non interconnectivity. I suspect Jaap is quite correct that hyperconnected kids would relish opportunities to unlock their digital gadgets and make them interconnect. The world needs to be more democratically productive and in an age of commodity hardware, open source software, open interconnectivity, the next step is to broaden the open source nature of the optiputer by showing kids ways to interconnect their own communications devices in their own homes and schools. The desire is there as this picture set from japan shows.
On arch-econ Jaap explained further: “the “wall” is only one component in the room-network I propose. In the case of the HyperRoom just ask any young intelligent person what he/she has in his/her room at home now : Laptop, TV, beamer, game console, cellphone, video recorder, DVD player, CD player, MP3 player, books, coffee machine, loudspeaker, iPod, webcam, photo camera etc, etc. etc.
Do they interwork ? No. Can he /she for instance get the TV images on the laptop or the Internet Youtube or delay-Tv images on the TV set?? NO
Obstacles: content owners, formats, proprietary technology. Island design. Just like wide area networks in the pre-internet era.
Students can together design around these obstacles and build first class work/study/cooperation environments (micro-internets) for themselves if they band together and make a fist. And by using technolgical solutions which are available and under construction by the big-science guys (as depicted in the Feb COOK Report issue). All I suggest is take that technology and put it in the hands of the young. Starting with the college- and university students. My slogans give focus and banner text to such movement. And - at least in the Netherlands - we have the broadband Network infrastructure in place to make this move. So we can stay ahead.”
Cook’s Edge: So says Jaap. Smart man.
So where is ICTRegie? And an American equivalent program linking Ed Seidel, Harvey Newman, and Irving Wladsawsky Berger.
Anyone who thinks this is just “cute” should look at Tom de Fanti’s December 14 2008 presentation of the state of opti-portals and green computing. And then finish off with the consumer grade tiled displays already being sold.