The Coolest Town in Singapore

Visionary technology ideas in the year 2020 for the Philippines?

I wanted to write this post about my coolest town in Singapore experience. Not because I want to blog about the coolest technology stuff but to be able to recollect back in time once these technologies become available in the future. How far is that future — 5, 10, 15 years perhaps? Let us check out some of these technologies:

Digital Home. Alot of people are banking on this to happen pretty soon where the Media PC would be the center of all the devices and appliances in the digital home enabled. The digital home prototype is not impressive although it demonstrate the convergence of TV, Audio, Video, Photos, and computer in one powerful media PC and only one output LCD screen. If you look at the center of the prototype above, the LCD screen acts as both mirror and the TV which is a very neat architectural execution (which gave me an idea for my condo). The idea is that not only the appliances are fully connected but also, the home is connected to the outside world via webservices from internet sites like airline carrier, radio stations, google sites, etc. The infrared keyboard was cool as well although, it is a one finger at a time typing technique and cannot take in simultaneous keyboard strokes. Bottomline, the keywords would be Convergence, Appliance Networking, and Web Services in the future.

Virtualization. On 3d virtualization, there was an interesting demo on virtualizing a physical space (in this case, the lobby of cool town) in a tablet PC and as you move it, it changes views to where you are physically oriented or looking at. It was able to determine it by having GPS or location based detectors and respond to it accordingly. Now this is cool 🙂 We are now experiencing the power of google earth using satellite images and imagine being able to recreate the world’s environment in 3d and not use top-level satelite point of view.

Digital Pen. A digital pen where whatever you write gets recorded. You can also have a specially printed form where if you use a digital pen to write on it, it can record your actual entries and its relative location on the form.

Future Workspace. Hmmn, lets see if people will start working isolatedly in a bike or spaceship type of mode where it promotes two screens, one for business applications and one is for personal/ games so that you can work life balance 🙂 We’ll see about that.

Interactive Posters. Advertisement on posters or even billboard someday would be able to communicate with mobile phones or PDAs.

Poster Kiosks. Buying artworks (reproduced) in museums can now be done interactively with this proof-of-concept kiosks.

RF ID Cafe. The idea is that the coffee mugs in a cafe would be identified to the person drinking it so that it enables a personalized experience when you are inside enjoying your coffee. It could let the barrista know personal information about yourself and your preferences.

However, I think the best technology in this coolest town is this self-service printers in the reception lobby where you can plug in your CF card and print your own photos instantly! Maybe not a revolutionary technology but it works we had fun taking pictures and printing it. Really cool! This gaves me an idea for a business venture ….