The future of kids bedrooms

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Ian Pearson, August 2005

Kids bedrooms must be among the highest concentrations of technology anywhere, with hifis, MP3 players, calculators, fancy digital watches, phones, mobile phones, digital cameras, TVs, DVD players, computers, games consoles, web cams and various electronic toys, all in 10 square metres. But it will go much further in the next few years.

Many kids have brothers or sisters, and there are constant problems trying to limit petty pilfering and unauthorised borrowing from each other’s rooms. Very soon, smart tags will make their way into our homes in large quantities, on supermarket packaging where the bar code used to be. Cheap tag readers and DIY kits will allow these to be used in the home as well as the supermarket. The same chips that ensures that goods are logged and paid for as we leave the shop, could easily be re-used to log when and by whom the CD was ‘borrowed’ from the bedroom, and can also tell where it is now to make recovery easy. It will even make it possible to find lost items among the piles of garbage that lurk in most kids rooms.

Smart paint will incorporate tiny sensor chips, monitoring sound, recognising voice commands, communicating, processing and storing data. These chips will make their rooms into high functionality cyber-palaces with enormous electronic functionality built into the walls themselves. But system administrator privileges and all they deliver may be retained by parents, and the power of surveillance this conveys may sometimes prove irresistible, making sure that the kids do their homework or checking that they aren’t taking drugs.

Smart paint is just a starter. With the declining cost of display technology, a child might have a whole corner lines with screens, giving them a personalised virtual extension, as large as they like, furnished and decorated how they like. A small bedroom could become as large and dynamic as the child’s imagination, and doesn’t get messy as easily. Large displays could also be linked to high speed broadband to allow cyberspace tunnels to friends’ rooms, so that they can socialise easily, or hold virtual sleepovers. Cheap video cameras are already fairly ubiquitous so this won’t be much of a problem to configure. Kids could have their friends around for sleepovers as often as they like.

Since kids aren’t so concerned at having a nice view onto the back garden, they are more likely to be up for using such large displays as virtual windows, with displays located where the real window used to be. Instead of the lawn or the street, they can instead look out and watch the girls (or boys) go by on a distant beach. These could obviously double as TVs or computer monitors.

Audio technology is catching up with the dream too. Various new inventions are making it possible to have well directed sound, audible only in certain places. A teenager could listen to the TV even if a younger brother is trying to do homework in the same room. Computer games could also be made much more realistic with sounds seemingly appearing from the middle of the room. Truly convincing 3d sound systems are already being developed.

Nanotechnology and advanced materials will greatly reduce the work involved in looking after a bedroom. Clothing wouldn’t need ironed or washed so often with new self cleaning materials. Anti-bacterial coatings would help keep the room fairly safe, and windows can be coated with stuff that stops dirt from clinging, it just falls off.

Security technology designed originally to police access in offices to valuable corporate secrets will also be used by kids to keep their own stuff to themselves. With increasing integration of equipment, it will be easy to restrict access to any electronic device, making it pointless to ‘borrow’ something without the owner’s permission. And of course, encryption technology will gradually spread so that kids’ files can be kept secret too.

The digital mirror won’t be far way now. Kids love to make up and dress up, and with the digital mirror, they can choose how they want to look when they are on-line in computer games, or videoconferencing. Head-up displays will become popular for video games and for watching DVDs, and these will adapt to augmented reality, overlaying computer images onto the real world. Kids will choose their appearances for the augmented reality, with dual fashion, kaleidoscopic video makeup and all kinds of video body adornment. Their bedroom might also have a wide range of virtual inhabitants too, with monsters living under the bed, aliens living in their flying saucer in the corner, or cute teddy bears wandering around.

The augmented reality inside a kids bedroom could have as many layers as the child wants to program up. With millimetre accurate positioning thanks to radio beacons on the ceiling, every real object could have a virtual overlay, or many. The whole appearance of the room could change according to time and context, or on what mood the child is in.

Finally, artificial intelligence would have a big impact. The child would be able to converse with their machines. In fact, some machines would even have their own social lives, talking to other machines in the kid’s room, or those belonging to his friends down the road. Barbie could have an affair with Ken’s best mate with her own telephone and email accounts. And given the number of kids now who are only children, companionship will be an important role for future AI. The natural location for AI is in toys and robots, as well as the boring old computer. So kids won’t be the only inhabitants of their bedrooms. As well as the various fungi growing on forgotten slices of cake or in half empty mugs, we will also have robots in the bedroom. Robots that behave and look like small people will become popular as costs come down to a few hundred pounds. Kids might confide in robots in ways that they might not with their parents. Robots might be among their friends. Today, young children often treat their cuddly toys as if they were real and form real emotional bonds with them. In the not very far future, these cuddly toys may well be sentient creatures in their own right, so will be able to reciprocate and love the child back.

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