What have Edinburgh Napier, Tom Cruise and Steve Jobs got in Common?, Tuesday February 02 2010
Here in Edinburgh,
we’re used to our boffins developing firsts in science and
technology, but experts at Edinburgh Napier University have
been particularly busy in recent weeks, racking up two rather
interesting firsts.
They've teamed
up City University of Hong Kong, to create Hong Kong’s first
Biofuel Research Centre. It’s modelled on their own centre, a
first in its own right, here in the UK.
They’ve also launched a
‘meeting room of the future’ stuffed full of the latest
high-tech gadgets.
If you haven’t seen the video yet, the £150,000 room, thought to be
the only one its kind in the UK, is a mix of
a Tom Cruise film and what we imagine the
inside of Steve Jobs head looks like.
The room allows users to fully interact with tables, screens,
printers and even the walls (you can draw anywhere on these,
perfect for doodlers) and it’s envisaged that these type of
intuitive multi-user environments will one day become standard not
only for businesses, but for households too. Just think, those
routine, everyday arguments over the dinner table could be resolved
instantly. You know the type, whether Pi is a rational or
irrational number, how oxbow lakes are
formed, or whether it was Prometheus
or Dionysus that stole
fire from the gods.
It won’t all be plain sailing, mind you. We reckon that drastic
action would have to be taken to combat one of the negative
consequences of the technology: A dramatic rise in incidences of
cheating during games of Trivial Pursuit.
