By Roland Piquepaille
You probably recently read that some companies were selling intelligent refrigerators for about $8,000. Of course, with such a price tag, you have an Internet connection and lots of bells and whistles.For example, here is what you can see on the LG Electronics website.
Watch the morning news, download recipes, send and receive e-mail, or leave video messages for your family with a refrigerator? You can if it's the LG Multi-Media Refrigerator. It combines leading-edge refrigerator technology with digital connectivity and control and brings you an unprecedented degree of convenience, quality, and coolness.
But do you know where this technology comes from? Yes, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. (For other MIT projects, please check "A fresh breath of Oxygen for the MIT")
In "MIT Counter Intelligence Group Cooks Up Kitchen of the Future," Frank Byrt wrote about this specific project and says that the range of innovations goes from "the sublime to the ridiculous." [Note: Unfortunately, this article is only available to Wall Street Journal paying subscribers, and I haven't found a free link to this story. So here are a few quotes.]
The seminal product for Media Lab's kitchen developers, known wryly as the Counter Intelligence Group, is Minerva, an interactive countertop camera/scale/computer device that will talk the chef through any of thousands of recipes. No more of Grandma's dog-eared three-by-five cards to cull through on Thanksgiving morning, Minerva will hold your hand instead.
The prototype unit has a camera that hangs above the kitchen counter to read the radio frequency identification, or RFID, bar-code tag on top of each ingredient container, which interacts with a scale built into the counter to prompt the chef through the steps of a particular recipe.
Ted Selker, an MIT associate professor and director of the Counter Intelligence Group, said Minerva is just the start of kitchen-products efforts, which began in 1998. He says the kitchen is ripe for artificial-intelligence technology and has always been a hotbed of innovation.
A few of the many ideas cooked up in the Media Lab kitchen include: an "adjustable countertop," which is programmed to adjust its height to an individual's preferences; a "chameleon mug," which changes color depending on the temperature of the contents via a built-in sensor; and "counterACTIVE," a programmable toaster that can pull a greeting, a daily horoscope or a stock price off the Internet and burn it onto the bread.
Eating the stock price of your company when it sinks, what an idea!
In the rest of the article, the author gives more details about other products coming to the market, and especially future networked appliances.
Sources: MIT Counter Intelligence Group; Frank Byrt, Dow Jones Newswires, November 20, 2002
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