Courtesy of Gizmodo Guests check out the Phantom 2, a drone in the Gizmodo "Home of the Future."
But tech and design blog Gizmodo has taken it one step further, assembling some of the tech world's most recent innovations into a "Home of the Future" exhibit near its SoHo office.
The pop-up installation includes a living room, bedroom, kitchen, and office, all packed with the latest devices, appliances, and furnishings that Gizmodo editors say will play a role in homes in the future.
This "home" has a little bit of everything, from an automatic Oracle espresso machine in the kitchen to a Roomba 870 vacuuming the living room. A Sonos system streams music throughout the house while guests check out a large selection of wearable tech from Garmin and Fitbit. There are even two drones and a telepresence robot patrolling the scene.
Courtesy of Gizmodo
The telepresence robot outside Gizmodo's office.
Courtesy of Gizmodo
Gizmodo's kitchen, complete with a replenishing tower and a unit from Windowfarms.
"Growing fruits and vegetables at home is a great way to keep food production local and literally within the family, and the marketplace for new products and innovations in this field gets more interesting every year," Manaugh said to Business Insider.
Gizmodo's selection includes a self-watering, self-replenishing tower that would make it easy for city-dwellers to grow fruits, vegetables, herbs, and spices in their kitchens. Windowfarms also makes garden wall units that are easy to install.
"New gadgets and technologies for making at-home agriculture a reality are something we've been watching at Gizmodo with a lot of excitement and interest," Manaugh said.
Courtesy of Gizmodo
People mill about the pop-up space.
"We've been joking that the future looks great-but it requires an awful lot of electricity. That's not going to work for a lot of reasons, from climate change to simply being able to pay our own utility bills, " Manaugh said. "The discovery or invention of new sources of power will be central to any high-tech vision of tomorrow."
One way to cut down on excess energy is to make more efficient gadgets, meaning they're either manufactured more efficiently or designed to make better use of their batteries. Cardboard wine bottles in Gizmodo's kitchen, for example, require less energy to produce than do more traditional glass bottles.
Courtesy of Gizmodo
"The Eventual" is powered by bacteria that feed off the soil.
There's also potential for inventing completely new energy sources, in addition to solar and wind power.
"One of my favorite things here in the Home is actually an art project made by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania that uses electricity generated from microbes in soil to make a small screen light up," Manaugh said. "The idea is that, someday, maybe micro-organisms in the ground itself could power our phones and tablets."
You can check out the "Home of the Future" in Gizmodo's office through tomorrow night.