Itgs – Areas of Impact Home and Leisure Homes and Home Networks: lighting a 'cure' for sick building syndrome
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- The men smashed their way into Mr Ellisons conservatory
- ITGS – Areas of Impact H ome and Leisure
- They will be able to start a dialogue with the house
- ITGS – Areas of Impact Home and Leisure Homes and Home Networks: Entertainment Centres
- Microsoft has stepped up efforts to turn PCs into home entertainment hubs.
- Microsoft wants products to work together
- What is the focal point here Are televisions getting too big
- A lot of people put them over fireplaces - that can look faintly ridiculous and completely dominate a room
- Once upon a time televisions were rather small
- Digital projection does not degrade the quality of the picture Home and Leisure Digital Entertainment: Films
- The industry has reached a watershed, and digital cinema is about to take off in a big way
- Goblet of Fire from Warner was released digitally in 18 countries
- Digital encryption will help protect against film piracy
Home and Leisure Homes and Home Networks: Security Raid foiled by laptop in Spain A  man caught burglars raiding his £600,000 house when his home security system sent CCTV images to his laptop computer as he holidayed in Spain.
John Ellison, 52, from Lancaster, was alerted to the intruders by an automatic call to his mobile phone. By logging on to his CCTV system he managed to see men turn his house upside down before calling police and watching their arrests live. Police led two men in handcuffs downstairs and they were later charged. The thieves had smashed his conservatory window to get into the property on 7 September.
Mr Ellison said: "The alarm system rang my mobile and when I logged on, I saw three men hurrying through the house doing damage," said the company director. "Then I saw the police go upstairs and saw them come down with two men in handcuffs. "Anyone thinking about doing this now has a serious deterrent. I'm extremely delighted with the system." Mark Johnson, 46, and Ian McClements, 20, admitted burglary at Lancaster Magistrates Court on 8 September. They are due to be sentenced on 5 October. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/5346118.stm
In the future, you may never have to worry about forgetting to switch off the lights or locking the front door when you leave home. You could soon be able to do all this and more from the comfort of your car or via your mobile phone, thanks to the Internet Home Alliance group. This association of leading electronics and consumer companies have come together to produce a system that lets you control your home from wherever you are. They are going to test out the technology, called Onstar at Home, in February at 100 homes in the Detroit area in the US. "The key goal of this pilot is to understand which of the many features that we could offer to the public have value, so that one can consider how this is brought to market," explained Jim Devlin of Invensys, one of the companies involved in the project. Connecting over the net The families will try out the system for four months, interacting with their home by phone, web or wireless. The homeowners will also have cars equipped with voice recognition technology, allowing them to connect to their houses on the move.
The internet forms a key part of the network. Every home involved in the trial will have an always-on broadband connection and every single communication from the homeowner will travel over the net. Each homeowner will have a private and secure webpage, through which they could program their lights, thermostat and security system.
The idea behind the project is to create an internet lifestyle. If you had an unexpected visitor at home while you were at work, the system would contact you via e-mail, text message or by calling you.
You could then unlock the front door remotely and let your visitor in. One of the potential uses for the technology is for home security, so that if the house was broken into, you would notified immediately and web cameras on the property would take an instant snapshot. "Houses are already moving to online meter-reading; appliances have microprocessors in them," said Mr Devlin. "It is inevitable that every home will be a smart home." The Internet Home Alliance brings together a group of diverse companies, such as General Motors, Invensys, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard and ADT Security Services. "We've created an environment that has brought diverse companies together to produce solutions for the consumer that the individual companies would not have created on their own," said Tony Barra, president of the Internet Home Alliance. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1776047.stm
In his annual address to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft boss Bill Gates announced software which lets TVs play video or music stored on a desktop. The products are part of Microsoft's world of "seamless computing", where digital content can be access from anywhere by any device. "We are taking that hub concept and making it a reality," said Mr Gates. Mr Gates also gave details about a line of handheld devices, called Portable Media Centers which can play video, music and show photos.
Microsoft has been looking at ways of extending its software beyond the desktop and push into areas traditionally associated with consumer electronics such as TV sets. "We are working hard to get all these consumer electronic devices to connect together," Mr Gates told visitors to the Consumer Electronics Show, the world's largest consumer technology show. "There is still have a lot of frustration about how these things work," said Mr Gates. He outlined a program called the Media Center Extender which would allow people to play on a TV video, music or show photos stored on a computer's hard drive. Microsoft's aim is to have desktops running its Media Center software as the entertainment hub of the home, with TV, stereos and other devices all hooked up to it. Mr Gates also announced plans for an adapter kit for the Xbox to turn the games console into a media centre.
Not content with just extending its presence in the home, Microsoft is also eyeing up portable entertainment centres.
The pocket-size devices, announced a year ago, were supposed to go on sale for Christmas. They are now expected to be in the shops in the second half of this year. Companies such as Samsung, ViewSonic and Creative Technology are working on versions of the devices which are expected to cost between $400 and $700. Wrist action The Microsoft chairman also announced the much delayed launch of smart watches based on the company's Smart Personal Objects Technology. The watches were first demonstrated a year ago. But manufacturers such as Fossil and Suunto now have models on sale, starting at around $130. They use Microsoft technology to gather news and weather reports and other information via radio waves. The data service, called MSN Direct, costs $9.95 a month and covers 100 of the big US cities and five in Canada. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3378519.stm ITGS – Areas of Impact Home and Leisure Homes and Home Networks: Entertainment Centres
Are televisions getting too big? California is cracking down on big flat-screen televisions because of energy usage. But has the super-size TV set become an object of vulgarity? Not so long ago, the television used to sit in the corner of the room, often shut away in a cabinet and only let out for limited periods of time.
Nowadays it's big and bold, often dominating the room and commanding everyone's attention. Everyone can see it and all eyes are usually on it. Much has been written about the energy-guzzling nature of the bigger flat-screen TVs, but there is no doubt these sell at a furious rate. Flat-screen TVs broadly come in two varieties - LCD and plasma. The first is smaller but getting bigger all the time, while the second already goes up to an almost cinematic 100in-plus.
It's not only environmentalists who view the sales figures with despair. Designers think the super-size trend has gone too far. Jo Hamilton, an interior designer and tutor, says on an aesthetic level our attitude to television sets has changed - and not for the better. "Clients used to want TVs put in pieces of furniture so they could be hidden away - now many build their whole room around them," she says. "People seem to have accepted TVs are a big part of their lives. They are always one of the first discussion points when it comes to a room design. It's sad really." Looming presence It's not unusual for a home to have a 50in set these days, which creates space issues as the average size of a UK living room has stayed roughly the same. "It means people have had to put them on walls, which I'm really not a fan of," says Ms Hamilton.
"It's like being in a cinema," Ms Hamilton adds. The stock placement of the super-size screen above the fireplace doesn't work for Giles Kime, deputy editor of Homes and Gardens magazine. "That can look faintly ridiculous and completely dominate a room. There is something a lot more discreet when they sit in a corner." But he thinks manufacturers are making TVs a little more pleasing on the eye. "Happily, television as bits of design are more aesthetically pleasing than ever before. People don't try and hide them away in the way they did 10-15 years ago." His magazine recently published a feature on coping with a monster screen and recommended three tactics - a recessed bit of a wall, freestanding on a cabinet in the corner, and shut away as in days of yore. He admits: "It is more problematic with traditional interiors." But bigger screens are in demand because TVs have evolved into home entertainment centres, and aren't watched or used in the way they used to be, says Tom Dunmore, editor-in-chief at Stuff Magazine.
The new technology, which will also slash distribution costs for film studios, has not yet become common because of high costs. But there are plans for studios and cinemas to share the costs, the president of the National Association of Theatre Owners (Nato), John Frithian, has said. There are currently only 161 digital projectors in cinemas around the world, with half in the US - out of a total of 130,000 screens worldwide, of which 35,000 are in the US. As well as offering better picture quality, digital projectors allow events like concerts to be beamed into cinemas, and make it cheaper for adverts to be shown. After several years of uncertainties over cost, technology and developing one standard system, Mr Frithian told industry convention ShoWest that the problems looked like being resolved. "With that, the digital roll-out could begin by 2004," he said.
Digital projectors cost $100,000-$150,000 (£62,000-£94,000) per screen to instal. There had been uncertainty over whether cinemas would have to install different digital systems as they do with digital audio. But cinema owners, film studios and equipment manufacturers are working to devise a set of standards. And digital has been proven to be better quality than the old 35mm projectors with the unveiling of a new "2K" microchip. Rock concerts have already been beamed live into cinemas that are already equipped with digital technology, and have proved to be a hit with fans. The change will also make it cheaper for advertisers to show full commercials, rather than just slides, which are currently common on US screens. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2825689.stm
Digital Entertainment: Films Cinema meets digital technology Filmmakers have relied on film to make their movies for almost as long as the industry's been around. Shooting on film may be expensive, but it has a special quality unrivalled by any other media, and though we are not necessarily aware of what is going on behind the scenes when we turn up at the box office, we are stepping into the world of 35mm film. The release prints of movies arrive in projection rooms as 10,000 feet of film printed as a copy of the original. So far the only sop towards digital in the analogue cinema world has been in the realm of sound. But now, finally, film itself may be facing the final curtain as cinemas find the pull of digital forces irresistible.
Digital projection systems are the latest thing. The release copy of the movie is delivered on a hard drive, sporting 100 gigabytes of the latest Hollywood fare, a digitally scanned copy of the master film print.
The big advantage of digital projection is the picture quality. With film, every imperfection gets shown as the 35 mm print passes through the projector, including scratches, fluff, blotches and so forth; not exactly what the director intended for their creative vision. With a digital projector linked to a server there are no more stray hairs, scratches or dust - just a crystal clear picture.
"It's taken so long because it's been a question of agreeing in advance," said David Hancock of Screen Digest. "It's been a consensus building process, which started in 1999 with the first commercial release of Star Wars Episode One. "Since then we've had five years of testing the technology, building a consensus and agreeing the business models and technology to be used, and this took longer than most people expected."
Now the industry has reached a watershed, and digital cinema is about to take off in a big way. A couple of years ago there were only 335 digitally-equipped screens worldwide. By the end of last year, in which Hollywood finally published a common technical standard, that number had almost trebled, to 849 screens. Forecasts predict 17,000 screens in just a few years from now, concentrated in the movie world's spiritual home, the US.
The most obvious saving is in distribution costs. An average length feature film print costs around £700 ($1,300). Encoding it and delivering a hard drive to the cinema works out at a fraction of that. In future, the possibility of delivering the movie by satellite or over the net has got the bean counters salivating. One of the other great costs to the movie industry is piracy, which Hollywood claims has cost it $6bn (£3.2bn). Distributing movies digitally means they can be encrypted before they even leave the studios, and then unlocked by software at the cinemas themselves. Tinseltown's films could get more showings, too. Digital movies can be streamed from the server to different screens at the same time; or alternatively a variety of movies can be shown on the same screen throughout the course of a day. But perhaps the most exciting thing for the cinemas is that digital projection gives them a flexibility they could only have dreamt when they had to use film. "With a digital projector you can input virtually anything into it," said Steve Knibbs of Vue cinemas. "[We can screen] a DVD, a clip downloaded from YouTube, gaming from a digital projector with multiple players on the screen at the same time, a live feed from satellite, cable and whatever. "Anything we can get as an input we can put up on screen. That means we go from being a place where you can just see 35mm films to becoming a true general entertainment place providing everything from gambling to gaming, educational lessons to movies they might not have seen for 40 years, and all sort of things like that."
The advent of digital also means that some technologies which were a bit suspect in the past can be revived. Brace yourselves for the return of 3D. In truth 3D never really went away - it has been the staple of the big-screen Imax experience for years. Imax uses two film projectors and two reels of film to fool our brains into thinking we are seeing 3D. That process has been too expensive for regular cinemas to contemplate, but digital projectors make it affordable for the first time. "It's not proved financially viable for some time," said Richard Boyd of the National Film Theatre. "This was something that was quite big in 50s and 60s and sort of dropped out, a bit of a gimmick, a bit like smellavision. "But now a single digital projector can run at a higher frame rate and show both left eye and right eye [images] from a single projector." There is now a real buzz about 3D; there are seven new 3D movies slated for release in the coming year. With technology available to recreate old classics, as well as show sporting events, in 3D there is a real feeling that 3D is finally coming of age. Even so, places like the Hollywood entertainment museum put these developments in perspective. Technology is important, but it is just one part of a bigger picture. Digital cinema, although it is being seen as a milestone on par with colour and sound, is still at its heart just cinema. Ultimately it is the finished product, the movies themselves, which will ensure we keep coming back for more. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/5262456.stm
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icrosoft's software targets TVs
ome and Leisure
