In this particular point in time, we may very soon end up saying goodbye to the says that we must ask our children, or worse yet ourselves, to stand up and go wash dishes. We could be infact be nearing the days where we can finally say, "tea, earl gray, hot" and our wish shall be granted.
For those that have no idea of what I speak of, I am talking about the replicator from star trek.
Apperently, the company known as Electrolux(though it saddens me that I could not find this on their actual website) has been desiging the kitchen of the future. They are working on two interesting ideas.
The first one is a concept that you place a piece of plastic like plates ontop of what looks like a scale and the device begins folding the sheet into different shapes making custom plates and bowls.
The other concept that they are working is based off of this, the idea is to form those plates out of very small particles that only come out when needed. These particles assemble themselves into sheets and then forms the shape of the dish and or plate desired.
The technique uses something that they are calling CATOMS or Claytronic Atoms.
Now the rub is, and the reason that I don't understand why they would bother with this, is that I know of absolutely no concepts of Claytronics that have actually managed to work on any large non microscopic scales.
The concept of claytronics is conceptually simple, microscopic robots would push the individual molecules into position and stick them into place. The reality of this is much more complex and the chemistry behind it is still fairly far beyond us as far as I know of.
However, there is hope for our replicator coming from the other end though.
Based on the cocept that I have seen of a 3d printer that makes 3d objects from a computer, the good folks at MIT have begun the process of desgining "the Cornicopia" in the same fashion.
It works by having the chef fill its cartradgies with the correct ingediants, and the fot printer makes prints it out dot by dot by mixing the correct ingrediants in precice amounts to make it perfect every time.
So in theory, you could tell it to make a pizza, it would tell you the ingrediants it wants, and it does the rest.
Oh yes, there are pictures of the concepts. I just thought that these two concepts to interesting to ignore.
Food printer "the Cornicopia" article.
http://www.geekologie.com/2010/07/print_...for "the Joy concept" CATOMS built plates
http://www.homeqn.com/entry/joy-concept-...and
http://www.homeqn.com/entry/morphware-pl...