Recently, Samsung released an advertisement which looks at the ‘new normal’. The advert shows the different ways technology has infiltrated everyday life – from the birth of a new born baby to communication technology. There is one scene in particular that captured my imagination.
Picture this: a young boy is running through a field in his school uniform and all of a sudden he’s surrounded by a stampede of Gallimimus dinosaurs. He looks back and he’s being chased by a T-Rex. As he’s running, he trips over another child, who’s staring with his Virtual Reality (VR) headset on – this is when it cuts to the classroom where the children are using VR to learn.
Samsung’s hook is that, for the next generation, this is the new normal. For me, this begs the question, what will everyday life in the home look like in 20 or 30 years?
Imagine a home where you could change the wallpaper to suit your mood or adjust to your guest’s preferences.
Imagine a home that knows that you’re coming through the door, greets you with a personalised message and gives you news of what’s happened while you’ve been away.
Imagine a home that lets you change the room sizes to meet your needs; need more space in the dining room on Christmas Day? Push the walls to make it bigger. Need an extra room to use for storage, merge two walls to create your space.
Imagine a home that is self-regenerating, fixing any holes in the wall or sort out any damp that is accumulating.
These ideas are no longer an impossible dream. We have technology that recognises our identity by our voice, fingerprints and face. We have VR that can transport you to another world. We have 3D printing that can create something new at the touch of a button. Yet even though these technologies are in their infancy, their possibilities know no boundaries.
So for the next generation, the ‘new normal’ is that anything is possible. Their hopes and dreams may seem out of this world to many of us, but in 30 years’ time, they may well be living amongst the stars in their custom-built space-pods.
For now, technology is moving us forward in so many ways and each new development makes us quicker, more accurate and closer to achieving a home that would have seemed like science fiction only a short time ago. We can only image what our children’s homes will look like – the possibilities are endless!