Light touch from Philips

A daylight window that gives the occupant of a hotel room total control over ambient light, and a pregnancy room designed to give mothers-to-be and their partners a less clinical, more personal look at their unborn child are among the designs of the future.

Philips Applied Technology recently demonstrated their vision at the Simplicity event held at London's Earls Court 2.

Its three Sense and Simplicity demonstrators showed how futuristic ideas from Philips Design can be turned into real world applications, particularly in the area of health and well-being.

The daylight window concept is aimed at the hotel market, where travellers can enter a room and find a controllable lighting and scene scenario to soothe the body and mind. 'The objective was to create patterns that throw shadows into the room in exactly the same way that moving leaves and branches would do,' said Karl van de Velde, project manager for Philips Simplicity event demonstrators at Philips Applied Technologies. 'To achieve it, we've used the light transmission properties of large-area LCD screens originally developed for use in flat-panel TV sets.'

Equipped with an advanced vision system, the window (above)features a user interface that lets hotel guests control the extent, density and background colour of patterns on the window using hand-gestures rather than a remote control. Its surround also incorporates lighting sources that they can use to receive light therapy, which might be used to overcome the effects of jet-lag.

In the pregnancy room (below), Philips demonstrated a future where ultrasound scans of an unborn child could be taken from a scanner incorporated into a belt worn around the woman's stomach. Images are then transferred to a console or on to a convex wall-mounted display. From here, a 3D image of the baby can be seen.