Wireless Home Networking - Index of

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Part V: The Part of Tens
The wireless orb knows all
Ambient Devices (www.ambientdevices.com)
offers wireless products that make tangible
interfaces to digital information. This sounds
broad, but so are their product offerings. They
offer glowing orbs that change colors based on
stock prices; umbrellas whose handles glow
when it’s going to rain; weather displays that tell
you, at a glance, what the weather is going to be
for the next 7 days; even an “Energy Joule” that
Your Entertainment Systems
In Chapter 12 we talk about ways you can connect your entertainment
systems (your home theater, TV, and audio equipment) to your wireless
network. Today that primarily means getting content from your PC and/or
the Internet into those devices using media adapters that connect to your
wireless network on one end and to your TV or audio gear on the other end.
In the not-so-distant future, however, you’ll be able to skip the extra gear
because wireless will be built right into your audio/visual gear. Read on for
some examples of how this will happen.
Wi-Fi networking will be built
into receivers and TVs
tells you the current price of electricity and your
consumption at a specific outlet. The key to their
ability to do this is their wireless network. All
products tune into the wireless Ambient
Information Network to receive broadcasted
data. Our favorite product is the Ambient Orb, the
colorful globe that we’ve programmed to tell us
when we’ve sold more books on Amazon.com!
Hewlett-Packard has released a Wi-Fi ready television. The HP MediaSmart TV
(www.hp.com) is a high-definition LCD TV with wireless Ethernet capabilities
on board. Through this television, you can access CinemaNow (www.cinema
now.com) and Live365 (www.live365.com) to download movies and music
instantly. You can also use an HP Snapfish account to store photos online and
have them play directly on the TV anytime. Other TV vendors are rushing to
offer Internet-connected TVs as well, with the ability in some cases to insert
a CableCARD to supplant your cable TV box. Expect to see Internet connectivity
to be standard soon in most higher-end TVs. As an interim step, Sony
offers an external device called the DMX-NVI BRAVIA Internet Video Link
(www.sony.com, $299). This device (which needs a Wi-Fi Ethernet bridge to
go wireless, see Chapter 12) provides a mechanism to access a variety of
Internet content on your shiny new BRAVIA LCD HDTV. We expect Sony to
move this functionality into the TV eventually and to add a fast 802.11n
wireless connection as well.