REDMOND (USA), April 19: The world’s software leader Microsoft impressed China’s president Hu Jintao on Tuesday with a tour of its most advanced technological innovations, including the ‘Home of the Future’.
Comfortably furnished, the facility in Microsoft’s Redmond Campus just outside Seattle is a model of the type of high-tech home the company envisions will be used in five to 10 years.
Stepping into the living room, Hu was shown a screen which displayed digital photos of a typical family.
With the movement of a Chinese vase, the photos changed to ones of places where Hu had lived or worked, including Beijing and Tibet as well as his alma mater Tsinghua University.
Forget photo albums.
“He’s very interested in the introduction and briefing by Microsoft people,” said Hong Lei, director of information in the Chinese foreign ministry’s North America division.
So ‘fascinated’ by what he was shown, the tour took about 15 minutes longer than expected, said Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman.
“He asked questions at every stage of the demonstration,” Gellos told reporters later.
One of the stops that interested Hu was the kitchen, where if Hu’s wife Liu Yongqing, who accompanied him on the tour, took out a sack of flour from the cupboard, the computer system in the home would immediately beam down suggestions of recipes she could make on the kitchen counter.
And the smart kitchen would remind the Hu household if the flour is used up and not put back in the cupboard to buy another bag on their next shopping trip, not that China’s first family would need to cook or do their own shopping.
In the closet, another point of interests for Hu, a seemingly normal mirror displays the day’s temperature, whether it would be appropriate to wear a certain item of clothing and suggestions for what to match with it once the owner takes out the piece of clothing.—AFP
