Laurie and I had a chance to visit the Home of the Future in the Innoventions Pavilion at Disneyland. Apparently Monday was the opening day. I just happen to be there that day. I was not aware of the opening. We showed up at 7:00 pm and the wait was about 20 minutes. Not too bad.
I’m going to assume that you know how the old Innoventions was set up, so I’m not going to go into great detail about how the mechanics of the preshow work.
The first thing you’ll notice is that they kept the Tom Morrow video opening out front. It also looked like only one of the four openings is available for entrance, so you are waiting about 10 minutes per guest entrance. We saw two groups go in before it was our turn.
We step on the rotating platform as usual and saw the same video opening, and then we were lead to a very familiar setting. We walked into the first room and there’s Tom on the right singing and on the left is a kitchen setting. After Tom is done singing we approach the kitchen area. Now a cast member comes out and begin this spiel about great innovators like Walt Disney, and then goes on to mention two home designers (whose name I can’t remember). These two designers we’re touted as great visionaries right next to Walt Disney. I understand what they were trying to get at, but no.
Anyways, this is the preshow section, they way it is designed, you can’t really skip this section, because there’s no where to go until you get to the end. You have to stand for the talk and pretty much just suffer through it. It’s a talk and not much else. There was no display of great technology or anything amazing.
During this preshow, you are standing on the rotating platform and it pretty much takes to almost to the full circle. When you finally get off the platform you’re standing in front of the house of the future. You see a house façade with three front doors (one on a platform). You also see a lot of frosted windows. If you look at the large frosted window, you’ll see the shadow of a great Disney icon (no quite hidden).
Now that you’re standing in the front of the house, you’re greeted by a member of the Elias family. In this case it was dad and he is celebrating the victory of his son’s soccer team. They’re going to China for a championship tournament. The cast member now shows us the features of the front of the house, which utilitizes all of the video screen in the front. You basically can custom design the front of you house and in this case show fireworks to celebrate the son’s victory. He also showed up the RFID keys for you and your dog, not really an innovative feature, since that’s how I get into my office at work.
We finally enter the main home. The common phrase we heard throughout the tour is “dad must still be working on it.” A lot of things were working and a lot of things were not working.
From here, you’re now on a walking tour. You’re free to walk around and go into any room. You start in the foyer, and you have a choice of the den, daughter’s bedroom, kid’s bedroom, kitchen, garden and game room. There are panels everywhere that allow you to control the lights in each room and change the music or music in the various rooms. The rooms have picture frames every that are digital and change images depending on whose in control. Each room has a member of the Elias family doing demonstrations.
In the daughter’s room, there is a “magic” mirror. It’s a video screen that acts as a mirror, so you stand in front and see yourself. The “daughter” comes in and demonstrates the “magic” mirror. When the daughter stands in front of the mirror, she can select clothes from her closest and then the cloth is overlayed on her “reflection”. We got to see the skirt in action, but the hair accessories were not working. “Dad must be working on it.”
We then went to the kitchen and the son where there. He showed us the voice activated computer, which can provide cooking demonstrations as well as maintain inventory of the kitchen.
I think the home of the future is a vast improvement to Innoventions. At the same time it was pretty underwhelming. I would have liked to have seen more features working. There was some cool technology, but nothing that I hadn’t seen before. The player piano is not new. Tables with interactive video monitors, cool, but not something that people really need at the moment. Sure you can read the paper on the table, or view photo with a few cool touch screen feature. Nice but not new.
My overall impression is improved and hope it will keep on improving. Definitely worth visiting once in a while, but not worthy of repeat visits.
