Smart art could be heading to your home
We’re not ones to get excited over crowdfunding projects – given the extremely chequered history of things going awry. Bit forgive us just a little about getting doughy-eyed over this smart Weather Poster.
This internet connected poster uses e-paper to turn the day’s weather into a piece of wall art. It’s designed to be unobtrusive and just blend into the décor of your home, while still providing a useful function. And while it’s no Van Gogh, for our money it’s nicely designed and would fit into most homes and workplaces.
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And the guys behind it are taking their Weather Poster seriously. In a homage to real art, they’re limiting runs to 500, which has nothing to do with demand, production costs at all.
So how does it work? You just hook your smart Weather Poster up to your Wi-Fi, and let it do its work. You get a standard design from your print run, which shows the weather at 8am, 12pm, 4pm and 8pm with a range of icons to show what you can expect. Just like a normal weather forecast.
There are a few downsides. It keeps information to a minimum, so you’ll only get today’s weather – before it switches over at midnight. Thus, in the evening, you’ll be seeing out of date weather – a weather review if you like – which doesn’t seem that smart to us.
Anyway, it’s an interesting project that goes further to demonstrate the power of smart ink in the home than we’ve seen before. However, we can’t help feeling the technology is a little underused, and when you can make weather forecasts look this good, when can we have an ever-changing run of real art on my wall, all displayed in glorious e-paper technicolour.
You can bag a Weather Poster for AU$189 which translates into £104 over at Kickstarter. The weather reports are free for two years and then are $7.99 a year thereafter.
