What About Aware Frames?

Whenever the topic of Bill Gates’ house comes up — you know, that $125 million shack where he hangs his hat — the technology inside it is always at the top of the discussion.

Oh sure, there’s a combined indoor/outdoor pool, an HDTV theater, a 22-foot-wide TV wall, and 64 kilometers of optical cable for networking, but one the coolest features, and the one that might be most relevant to wireless picture frames, is that the house is aware of who is in it.

Each visitor to the house is given a microchip to wear when they’re in the house. That chip relays their preferences about temperature and other conditions to the house, which then adjusts the room they’re in to match. When Gates is in the room, though, his preferences override anyone else’s. No surprise there.

What’s most relevant to us, though, is that Gates has had digital picture frames in his house for at least 5 years (He even has a patent on electronic distribution of pictures to frames).

Now, imagine combining the personalization technology with digital frames (I think Gates may have done this, but I can’t find any support online). Imagine walking into a room and having your digital picture frame turn on and start displaying your favorite photo album or the scores for last night’s game right away. Pretty neat, huh?

It could happen. RFID chips and readers could make frame awareness fairly easy and frames are already fairly close to instant-on.

The technology question isn’t the big obstacle here, though; it’s prioritization.

Let’s say one of these aware frames is hanging on the wall in the living room and Little Suzie is in the room, so her content is up on the frame. But then Dad comes in to get a book or to sit down. Does the frame change? And then, when Mom comes in to talk to Dad and kid, does the frame change again?

That could get annoying fast. Nobody’s going to argue with the world’s richest man, in his own house, about whether his preferences rule, but when it’s a regular family, with the tensions, frustrations, and rivalries (especially of the sibling variety) that we all have, aware frames could become another source of conflict.

The solutions to this could include some kind of prioritization: Suzie’s preferences always rule on the frame in her room, Dad’s always rule in the den, and they’re randomized between all family members in the living room.

This is a pretty advanced feature, of course, and probably won’t see the light of day until the frame market is much more mature. By the time it does arrive, if it arrives at all, hopefully manufacturers will have devised a way to prevent the digital picture frame from being another thing that drives parents crazy when kids fight over it!