Philips Research

Previous HomeLab Projects

PHENOM: Perceptive Home Environments

Polymer Light Emitting Diodes convert an electrical current directly into light. Low cost manufacturing and excellent emissive properties make it the preferred flat display technology.

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Dr Evert J. van Loenen, Principal Scientist:

"The Phenom project is aiming at trying to capture what the value is of future intelligent environments at home for people. What we do in the project is: we generate concepts, so we think of future scenarios, we develop all the technologies that are required to make it happen and then we build prototype environments in which you can actually have people walk around and experience what we have generated."
"So, from earlier studies it was discovered, when people were asked 'What are the most important things in your house?', they mention not the television, not the furniture and not the stereo set, they mention things that had emotional value, like photographs and souvenirs. Things that cannot be replaced. And we have chosen one application to test this with, that's a memory browser. Imagine, you're taking digital pictures... Shortly, you're gonna take a lot of them, because it's very easy to make them. You're gonna have thousands and they are gonna sit on a harddisk or a pile of CDs somewhere in your house. Now you get visitors and you don't want to take your visitors up to your study and sit behind the computer to look at your pictures. You just want to sit in your living room. And browse through them. Without knowing there are computers behind it. And that's what our system can do. You have a portable device. You can walk anywhere in your room and look at your pictures."