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Christmas in the house of the future

Are you crazy about high-tech? Do you find each innovation to be a gift from heaven? You will be thrilled over the next few years.

Jump ahead a few years. It’s three days before Christmas. You’re in front of the bathroom mirror. You slide a finger along the mirror equipped with a camera and transformed into a touchpad connected to the house’s wireless network.

The mirror recognizes your voice or face. You check your emails or watch YouTube. You check the latest news or road conditions while brushing your teeth, shaving, doing your makeup or cleaning the vanity and sink.

iStockphoto
iStockphoto

Curious, you check your body mass in the mirror. Very useful when you want to maintain a healthy weight during the holiday season.

To make sure you don’t run out of water, given the number of guests you’re expecting, you check if the device under the kitchen sink, which you use to recycle all the water you consume, is working properly. Because each year you receive a specific quantity of water that you must use for all your water needs. In other words, you consume water in a closed circuit.

Thanks to the savings generated by intelligent counters and other technological innovations, you are in a good mood this morning because you have surplus energy that you use to fuel your electric car. If your electrical consumption gets out of hand during the holidays, your electric car will come to the rescue.

You really aren’t short of energy. Pipes buried two metres in the ground allow you to save more energy because they use the ground temperature, which is higher than the ambient temperature in winter and lower in summer. In Europe at least.

You have to leave quickly for some last-minute errands? The solar-powered recharging station is available. You can pay remotely with this wonderful digital tablet that you may also use to set the cycle on the washing machine or manage your refrigerator, which is already filled with food. Naturally you’re doing all of this remotely.

Your neighbour is a step ahead of you. He has a new heating method. The heat produced by the computer processors is recovered in a radiator connected to the network with an Internet cable. Your neighbour uses a thermostat to control the temperature. Maybe someone will offer this radiator to you as a gift. You never know.

However, you have a device that your neighbour doesn’t: wallpaper that filters the countless electromagnetic waves that you bathe in. the wallpaper acts like a shield. The patterns are made using conducive ink.

Technology is nice, but it does have its problems. You also paid the price. Your refrigerator, connected to the Internet, was used as a platform for a cyber attack. Rather troubling to know that pirates are using domestic objects connected to the Internet to inundate a corner of the planet with thousands upon thousands of spam and fraudulent emails.

Nevertheless, you pray hard to receive a magnificent solar barbecue as a gift. Nothing less.

In what year does this Christmas take place? Hard to say. Somewhere between 2030 and 2050. Some of these innovations are still being researched and may never see the light of day, while others are about to be marketed and some are already available.

We’re pretty sure that the indoor environment of 2020 will already be much different than in 2014.

References:

Manuel d’écologie urbaine, peut-on vivre 100% écolo en ville? Guillaume Jan, Céline Vautard, Eudoxie Jantet, François Bourin Éditeur, 2013, 282 pages

Les 50 innovations qui vont bouleverser notre vie d’ici 2050, Eric de Riedmatten, Archipel, 2013, 400 pages

Photo: iStockphoto LP