Premise Attractive Theme

Motorola Premise

123

Senior Member
FYI
The folks at FastTrack Team have a clean-looking MediaCenter-like theme for Premise and incorporated a 'home avatar': http://www.fasttrackteam.com/images/MediaA...nScreenShot.jpg

I believe it is all part of the company founder's home and the avatar ("talking head") was given the name "Cleopatra". I couldn't find anything on YouTube; however, I do recall seeing the home featured on some TV program. Although many automated homes feature text-to-speech, an avatar provides an extra dimension to the home's "personality". Altogether, a nice Theme and an interesting use of Premise.

If avatars interest you, have a look at the open-source initiative called Xface.
 
Whatever your imagination desires ...

Interesting how they designed her; she's far from life-like. They appear to have exaggerated specific facial features possibly in an attempt to make the avatar more emotive. Oversized eyes and lips, tapered neck, highly oval face; distinctive but not entirely natural. Could be the science of visual communication at work or maybe Cleopatra's designers just prefer that pubescent, waif-look.
 
Interesting how they designed her; she's far from life-like. They appear to have exaggerated specific facial features possibly in an attempt to make the avatar more emotive. Oversized eyes and lips, tapered neck, highly oval face; distinctive but not entirely natural. Could be the science of visual communication at work or maybe Cleopatra's designers just prefer that pubescent, waif-look.

Yup, it looks like Angelina Jolie :wacko:

angelina_jolie_wallpaper_1024x768.jpg
 
I contacted them a couple of years ago about this and asked if they were ever going to release anything and got a maybe kind of answer and never heard anything again. They won an award from Electronic House for that installation.
 
Yup. That's the one :wacko:

2006 House of the year. Someone else want to try and get them to release it :)
 
If you peruse the site, you'll see the price of the lovely lady....it appears she goes for a Spitzer-ian sum of $2K. Doesn't include the $5K for the platform, including HW.

If you hit the news section, you can see a video or two...Is it still running on Premise? Also has some good ideas on using RFID for keep track of items as you toss 'em away....(which to me was always the habit challenge, vs the technical challenge)

I remember seeing the article...glad to see she hasn't aged :wacko:
 
If you peruse the site, you'll see the price of the lovely lady....it appears she goes for a Spitzer-ian sum of $2K. Doesn't include the $5K for the platform, including HW.

If you hit the news section, you can see a video or two...Is it still running on Premise? Also has some good ideas on using RFID for keep track of items as you toss 'em away....(which to me was always the habit challenge, vs the technical challenge)

I remember seeing the article...glad to see she hasn't aged ;)

It is worse then that, the greeter is $2995 on top of the 5k platform. It looks like a 3D figure from Poser.
I could buy a lot of great hardware for 8k and I can still see the same old Premise Icons in the pic 123 posted.

The image Sic0048 posted looks almost exactly like my neice. The moddeling agency she used work for used to tell her she looked like Angelina Jolie also.
 
Im going to do just a quick 'back of the envelope' calculation....

Premise (free - okay , I paid $800 bucks, but)
RadioRA (120*15=$1800...of course i bought some off of ebay...)
Xantech ZPR68-10 ($150...off of ebay)
Server (Build it DIY thing....WHS, 2GB, blah, blah - prob <$400)
Aprilaire (thermo- $200 x 2; Adapter - $100)
GC-100 (125*2=250)
8 thousand blinkies....($50)
Insteon OutletLinks ($500, including controller)

Does that come out to 8K+? I'm sure they dont include the Ra, the Aprilaire, etc...AND

They dont get John's Insteon, Kenwood Sirius, or Netnews modules....

Priceless...

..but they do get the avatar....so until John creates a 'john' avatar......;)
 
You guys are too funny. My wife (who does look like Angelina, right honey) would think I've lost my mind if we had an avatar (especially like this one) in the house. She already thinks that our home automation project is way over the top, although our neighbors love coming here for parties and messing around with the control pads.

Since we're on the topic of UI, I'll give you guys a sneak peak on something I'm working on. I'm using a tool I found called WebGUI from a company called Gizmox. It's an open source project that aims to bring "rich UI" experience to web applications. It supports both DHTML and Silverlight (I'm focused on the Silverlight portion), and can create some great browser-based interfaces. I'm including a few screen shots. I have a few simple goals

1. Have the UI continue to be browser-based
2. Continue to use the "Location-centric" Premise UI approach, but flatten-out the heirarchy a bit
3. Try to use some more modern controls (like the iTunes/iPhone/iPod touch flow-control) to navigate items
4. Make it skinnable
5. Use the Premise Builder to configure the UI
6. Support some level of extensibility

So now the bad news...

WebGUI is an ASP.NET -based environment so you need something like IIS to run it. That means some variant of Windows Server to host the app (I'm using 2003). I found an open-sourced product called Cassini which can host ASP.Net applications on systems not running Windows Server. I haven't tried it. Maybe somebody can download it and get familiar with it enough to host the new UI on it when I get it a little further along.

I'm not much of a UI programer, so if anyone wants to contribute skins, button icons, class icon's, etc. I'd be happy to include them into the project. I'll post some screen shots to the download area.
 
Well John, that's truly great news. Nice to see someone with the coding chops take on the GUI. Depending on when you get this to the test stage, I'll do my best to help. Also, depending on time, I'll try to whip up some graphical elements.

(I know I've said this before, just don't remember where ;) ) As for the avatar... Have any of you ever watched Red Dwarf? I have always thought that having Holly as the avatar would be a riot. Complete with accent and attitude. My guess is we're years away from that idea...

If you haven't seen it, it's pretty funny.
 
Sounds great, John, and timely, too. I was wondering how difficult it would be to run Premise under IIS. WHS/W2003 runs IIS and I have been slowly moving everything else to run under it...kinda a one stop deal....

I'll be interested to see how your UI stuff comes along...I have some UI guys that might be able to throw me stuff...

...and don't forget to put up the screenshots ;)
 
They are uploaded. I wonder if the CocoonTech folks need to approve these uploads before they are visible.

PM me your email and I'll forward you a word doc with the screen shots.
 
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