CES: NextGen Home – Zones 17 & 18
This section of The NextGen Home Experience featured products from the following companies: Life|Ware, ZON Audio Router, Belden Cable, DSC ConcoursePro Cable Enclosure, Klipsch Speakers, Brizo Faucets, and Vantage Lighting.
Zone 17 – Equipment Closet
In a normal house, this room would have been the clothing closet for the master bedroom. There were no clothes or shoes in this closet. In a business building, this room would have been a mess of wires and computer racks. There would be small sculptures of animals made of telephone wires that had been made while the IT guy was stuck there overnight trying to trouble shoot the servers.
In other words, this room was an anomaly in both the home and business environments. Most homes don’t have a “equipment closet†and most businesses have an equipment closet that is a claustrophobic mess of wires. There was no demonstrator at this zone to tell us the importance of adding an equipment closet to your home.
Zone 18 – The Master Bathroom
By the time we got to the Master Bathroom, the “What Happens When The Power Goes Out†guy had moved ahead of us and taken the demonstrator in the Master Bath hostage. We heard the whole story about how that man lived in an area with spotty power coverage and how all of this technology is a waste when we can’t reliably supply electricity to the remote areas of the United States.
The demonstrator nodded awkwardly with that panicked look that my cat gets when she knows we’re going to open her mouth and make her swallow a pill. Mike and I slowly backed away from the scene so as not to disturb the hostage situation after we took a picture of yet another Life|Touch Screen on the wall. I don’t know about you, but in a house of only about 1000 square feet, you can never have too many Windows Embedded machines built into the walls.
NextGen Home Experience Wrap-Up:
I was actually pretty impressed with the NextGen Home. It was interesting to go through. Because almost everything was “Available Today†it didn’t have that Golly-Gee Factor that the House of the Future at Disneyland had. It was more reasonable and believable. I’m sure glad we took the time to go through it because it gave me a bunch of ideas of practical things I could do in my house.