At home in gadget heaven

By CHRIS BARTON*

The future of consumer electronics lies in the toilet. In Tokyo, at the hotel New Otani, my toilet seat is heated warm, but no matter how much I push the buttons, the water jets will not spray. Fortunately, there is a low-tech paper roll. Too much information? There's much more.

Later, a wander through the marvel of consumer electronics, manga and anime shops that make up the Akihabara electronic-equipment town, reveals an abundance of toilet seats among massage chairs, foot massagers, thermometer probes and other electric devices to take blood pressure, your pulse and God knows what else. There are many models, but they're all Japanese to me.

It isn't until the next day at the Panasonic Centre - a high-tech showcase built around a dinosaur museum - that I see the future, literally, in the 2005 house. A porcelain-white oval bowl on a pedestal which automatically adjusts to suit your height. To the side, a thin LCD screen shows your weight, blood sugar and so on as you relieve yourself.

It doesn't stop there. In what Matsushita, the Japanese "super-manufacturing company" behind the Panasonic and National brands, calls "the ubiquitous network society", the toilet seat, like all other household appliances, is connected. In this ideal world, any worrying health signs are automatically added to your medical records and alert your GP who is quickly on your wearable mobile phone with advice.

Upstairs, in the 2010 house, the front door opens via an iris scan and a cute, puppy-like robot "agent" greets your arrival, turns on the lights, tells you who has called and where the children are. The study desk and chair have morphed into something from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and face a screen that takes up the entire wall.

The dining table is also a screen where jellyfish-like blobs - agents for mum, dad and the kids - swim around on the table top bringing up information, handling bookings and seeing that the kids' passports are up to date while the family plan their holiday to Tahiti.

The germ of this fancifulness is on display at Ceatec, Japan's largest consumer electronics show. There are mouldable electronic fabrics to one day make fabulous wearable gear. The mobile video phone - for so long just a cartoon notion on The Jetsons - is now real. But mostly, the promise of Tomorrowland remains unfulfilled fantasy.

As one of the 40 or so journalists hosted by Matsushita points out: "If you can't get a broadband connection today at the New Otani hotel, what chance is there of the ubiquitous network society in eight years' time?"

Like so many high-tech companies, Matsushita religiously believes its hype. At Ceatec, the future now - or at least very soon - is presented by an army of gorgeous Japanese women in mini-skirt uniforms and impossibly high heels. Plus an array of presenters, models, dancers and blaring Japanese pop - but with naff technological/corporate slogan lyrics.

Panasonic's ubiquitous network vision is not alone among the hundreds of companies displaying their wares. An American journalist spends much of one day recording just how often the word ubiquitous appears. She finds it's ... ubiquitous.

Panasonic's future largely centres around the TV. On its exquisitely made and impossibly large and thin plasma and LCD screens, information and entertainment - internet, shopping, TV, programming guides, video on demand - is at your fingertips. Yes, I know we've heard that before. But this time it's sans Microsoft.

In this phase of the convergence era, the TV fights back and it, not the PC, becomes the hub - the information portal to the ubiquitous networked world. Not just to the outside, because another device wirelessly connects the plasma TV and its attendant DVD recorder to all the other lovely thin screens in the bedroom, the kitchen and so on. Other appliances - dishwasher, fridge, clothes dryer/washer, oven, microwave, air-conditioner - perhaps even the robotic vacuum cleaner and undoubtedly the toilet - are also "always on" the network.

There is no end to the silliness. But parts of it are scaringly close. Such as the ability to dial up your fridge from your mobile phone and see what's inside thanks to the internal camera. Or, when someone visits when you're not home, the door automatically calls your mobile and shows by video who's there.

Back on planet Ceatec, Panasonic's new DVD player/recorder is grabbing some attention because it includes a 40 gigabyte PC disk drive and a PC card reader to take postage-stamp sized "SD" cards. The "convergence device" replaces the video tape-recorder and provides up to 52 hours of TV recording on its hard disk or up to 12 hours on its removable DVD-Ram disks. You can also simultaneously watch one recording while you record another, "chase playback" instead of waiting for a recording to finish. Or "time slip" back to a previous scene in a small on-screen window.

The DMR-HS2, as it's known, is shortly to be unleashed on the US market at US$999 and may reach our shores in November. Pricing here isn't yet available, but it will be interesting to see if New Zealand early adopters will buy at the US dollar equivalent or pay about 50 per cent more, as is so common with consumer electronics purchases here.

The consumer will also have some compatibility headaches. DVD-Ram is Panasonic's standard in the continuing recordable DVD format wars - reminiscent of the battle for supremacy between VHS and Beta tape. It's a war Matsushita says it's winning - claiming about 80 per cent market share in Japan and about 70 per cent in the United States.

It's not as disastrous for the consumer as it sounds, because most DVD recorders will play standard DVDs. But it will mean some disks won't play when you swap different DVD-recorded formats with friends or family. It's particularly annoying for the consumer because in the PC arena, multiplayer DVD recordable drives are just beginning to come on the market.

The other piece of PC-like paraphernalia set to invade the living room is the tiny "SD" (secure digital) card. These, along with several competing cards, are the consumer electronics equivalent of the PC's overly large floppy disk - a portable means of carrying and transferring digital information. But unlike the floppy disk, which works only in PCs, SD cards and their ilk have colonised a vast empire of consumer electronics - digital cameras, camcorders, MP3 audio players, handheld and notebook computers, voice recorders, printers, TVs and more.

That means the ability to pass information (at present 512 kilobytes but about to hit 1 gigabyte next year on SD) from one device to another - digital photos from your camera for display on your TV, or for recording onto DVD-Ram or printing on your printer - with no PC in sight. Fantastic, if it wasn't for more wretched format wars. Do you buy a device with an SD card, or CompactFlash, SmartMedia, MultiMediaCard or Sony's Memory Stick? Take your pick, as there is still no clear winner in this battle - but it does make life difficult.

And which card will plug into the toilet of the future? There, we will sit on a heated, height-adjusted seat, cleansed by caressing water jets, watching DVDs, TV and the internet, talking on our wearable mobile video phone - safe in the knowledge that worrying health signs are being monitored. The toilet will not just be a place we go to quite often, it will be a technological utopia we may never have to leave.

* Chris Barton visited Japan as a guest of Matsushita.