Welcome To The Living Room Of The Future

Welcome To The Living Room Of The Future

You’ve no doubt dreamed about the living room of the future. Ever since the advent of the TV — or the radio — images of friends and families gathered around the home entertainment systems of tomorrow have been flying at you in fiction. Wall-spanning TVs, virtual reality goggles, computerized assistants that respond to your every whim — all totally fathomable yet just beyond reach.

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But so much of it is already here. Gigantic, flat screens that are thin enough to hang like pictures. Tiny, touchscreen supercomputers that are ever present in our pockets. TV and movies on demand with just a few presses of a button, no pesky rental stores or rewinding required. And that’s not the end of it all — not by a longshot. So many of the pieces are in place, but the future is about how they come together.

Welcome To The Living Room Of The Future

Like any respectable modern-day living room, the living room of the future will revolve around big, beautiful screens. HD is old-school, and 4K UHD is on its way, whether it be in the form of Samsung’s curved UHD 4K HU9000, which sits like a miniature IMAX, or a Sharp’s Aquos Q+ TV, which uses innovative pixel-splitting tech to bring giant 80-inch screens of better-than-HD beauty to your living room at prices that won’t require a second mortgage. And eye-blastingly high resolutions are bound for your desktop, too, with monitors like Dell’s UltraSharp.

Of course, all those screens are no good without electronic brains behind them to push their pixels. We don’t have a Star Trek computer yet, but we do have a pre-built Origin Genesis PC with the a quartet of Nvidia graphics cards fit to fire off 4K graphics that can knock your socks off, and the Xbox One which is not only just a game-box but a cohesive living room hub with an attentive ear listening for your every command.

Welcome To The Living Room Of The Future

This month, Gizmodo Australia will be hopping in our domestic DeLorean to bring you what the future will have in store for the way we live. The Home Of The Future series focuses on smart tech for your home life and beyond. We’ve got a great month planned full of news, reviews and features.
Welcome to the future.

In the future, your home internet connection will become possibly one of the most important things in your living room. Sure, your giant, high-resolution screen, gaming console and streaming device will all have a role to play, but all of it will be for nought unless you have the brain power of the world wide web connecting your gadgets to the best and smartest entertainment content around.

Australia isn’t gifted with a swathe of home streaming options like the US is thanks to Foxtel’s exclusive content deals, relatively slow internet and streaming gadgets built primarily for the more content-liberal US market. But just because your living room is based in Australia doesn’t mean you need to be cut off from a world of amazing content. Netflix and other amazing services will likely come to Australia in the future, but this is about getting the home of the future in your life now.

You can subscribe to an amazing VPN provider to make your gadgets and the international streaming services they connect to — like Hulu, BBC iPlayer, Netflix and Amazon Instant — think that you’re in the US, so you can have all the content you can eat for a minor cost each month.

Getting all that content around to your devices in the living room of the future will also take a fast router, so you should future-proof your new den as much as possible with one of these.

By choosing your gadgets carefully to line up either with a manufacturer’s ecosystem (such as the Apple TV’s access to iTunes or Samsung’s Smart Hub interconnectivity), or whether you invest in a multitude of gadgets to take advantage of a world of content, you really can have the Living Room Of The Future in your home right now.

Stay tuned to Gizmodo’s Home Of The Future coverage this month as we bring you a look into what lies ahead for the smart home.


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