Optional
I want a fish-tank with these, so then I can have sumbarines and monsters chaing real fish! lol. Or Ships dropping depth-charges into the fish tank. The possibilities for silliness are endless.
:-)
Samsung's 46in see-through LCD screen will go into production this month, paving the way for the transparent tech's appearance in ordinary folks' living rooms. Initially aimed at specialist applications - Samsung is thinking of shops, museums, railway stations, airports and such - it'll be a while before the Samsung see- …
I'm thinking of the transparent screens that make up the glass bedroom wall that looks out onto his sea view (in the first movie?). I seem to remember the house bot woke him up with it, displaying news, weather, stocks etc
I'll also take a pair of prescription specs with this stuff built in please!
The transparent slates in Avatar were pretty cool, too.
I get the impression that the fridge is the last resort when the designers can't figure out what their product is actually good for. Like they run through a big list of problems it might solve, and eventually they get to the bottom of the list and somebody's added a note saying "btw, we're nearly out of beer".
One of our suppliers has already sold their initial stock of these screens. They list both 46" and 22" screens, the 22" having 1680 x 1050 pixels. The 46" is available for around £1,150, which while a bit more expensive than your bog standard LCD TV isn't totally unreasonable. When I first heard about these things (which are, after all, just a standard LCD screen with no case and no backlight) I thought "niche product, it'll be around £5,000)". We have several possible uses...
M.
... walking around France, some score years ago, where they had put touchscreens of sorts behind plate glass, with which you could make the CRT mounted in the shop's window tell you all sorts of indubitably highly interesting things, in French of course.
So, well, this sort of thing isn't that much of an enabler in the sense that if you'd really wanted you could've had most of the functionality years and years ago. It is, however, a nice gimmick.
There are a couple of places where a see-through display could come in mighty handy, but all the same I don't care for fully automated fridge doors enticing me to order (and thus spend) on impulse. I wish manufacturers would focus more on making things work than on trying to find ever sneakier models of squeezing monies out of an unsuspecting public.
To me, the most advanced thing I'd like to have in a fridge is a SNMP interface to read out temperatures and whether the door is closed, possibly set target temperatures. The reason a touchscreen might be nice in the door is because it happens to be a large area that otherwise might stay unused. Not counting the childrens' drawings and maybe reminders and administratrivia--not all of which are actually about buying groceries.
Thinking about it, I'd probably prefer the collection of paper put up with magnets to the clinically clean screen, even if it had electronic photo gallery functionality. Digital does have its upsides, but so does paper.
If you have to have a touchscreen there, then best make it steerable from the home automation server. But it'd be one device that happens to be integrated in another because of the convenience, not because there is any intrinsic relationship. There isn't. Until you recognise that people will continue to shrug about the wonderful things it's supposed to do.
There's a reason the old fully-automated internet-enabled digital-era buzzword-laden fridge is a bit of a laughing stock. It's about as useful as the waterproof furniture that was supposed to enable quick cleaning of the house using but a garden hose. You all remember that futuristic vision from the fifties, don't you?
Ok if your kitchen has room for a wide fridge. Most of us would have a small screen or something in portrait mode.
Why does this tech have to be part of a fridge? Wouldn't it be better to have it separate as a wall mount? Your fridge breaks down due to the motor packing in, and since they don't make that pump anymore, you need a new fridge TV too. All a bit expensive for a combined gadget.