RADIO TELEVISION Hong Kong's latest employee is making waves. It might surprise passers-by with cheeky asides like 'didn't you get enough sleep last night?' - but there's no getting your own back. Enter its office, a multimedia laboratory, and its unique capabilities are manifest. It can recognise voices and re-configure the lab's computers and furniture to individual specifications at a command.
SIGNAL, short for Selective Instant Generated Notions Artificial Laboratory, is a cybercharacter projected on to the walls and nearby corridor of RTHK's new Medialab - the world's first artificially intelligent, voice-activated media laboratory. SIGNAL, personified by its voice-synchronised projected orb, is the soul, as its creator puts it, behind a $1.5-million venture that represents the melding of cybertechnology and architecture, known as 'cybertecture'.
The Hong Kong Government and RTHK believe they have developed artificially intelligent architecture which is like computers taking orders from a captain on the bridge of a spaceship, or Arthur C Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
'Cybertecture is a design philosophy that marries information technology and architecture in a revolutionary symbiosis - one that is functional, practical and empowering,' says the project's architect, James Law, who claims to have coined the term, 'cybertecture'.
At Medialab's entrance, which was officially opened by Chief Secretary for Administration Donald Tsang Yam-kuen on August 8, Law logs on to a touchscreen, at which point sliding doors automatically open to reveal a hi-tech ambience of black light and smoked glass walls and floor. He proceeds to sit down in the crescent-shaped, purple sofa.
'Excuse me SIGNAL,' Law says, and as soon as he speaks a microphone in the ceiling rotates towards the direction of his voice. 'Hello, please choose a command,' says SIGNAL, its orb projecting on to a screen and wall. 'Close curtain,' says Law. 'Is this command correct?' asks SIGNAL. 'Yes, correct.' 'Yes, understood,' and the curtain begins to enclose a section of the 400- square foot room, where seconds later, a concealed conference table will rise from the floor.