Now that Silvester Stallone has just announced that he will be filming “Demolition Man 2”, it’s a good time to remember the meeting room of the evil Dr. Cocteau. Shot in 1993, the film imagined the future in the year 2032 and showed a series of occurrences far ahead of its time: the use of tablets, video conferences held in a meeting room occupied by totems with floating faces that moved to follow the speaker as he connected to a remote council, self-driving cars or the GPS integrated into all vehicles. “Demolition Man” imagined, already in the 90’s, technology in motion, remote meetings and video conferencing solutions.
At the beginning of the 2000’s, Albiral already bet on technology in motion. At the beginning they were motorized CRT monitors. The monitors did not rotate on an axis and did not adapt to the position of the speaker butthey appeared and disappeared inside the meeting table.
And in 2004 Albiral registered its first patent: a vertical and motorized flat screen lifting and retracting system as flat screens were progressively replacing the CRT technology.
Later on, in 2013, just 20 years after the film’s release, Arthur Holm developed his Dynamic3: the first motorized monitor that rotated 180 degrees on a rotation axis and allowed users to work with the screen in different positions.
In the year 2020, when we are twelve years away from the predictions of “Demolition Man”, Arthur Holm’s Dynamic4 has conceptual similarities with the technology used by Dr. Costeau. It’s not exactly the same, but we’re not that far off either. The monitors have cameras, appear when needed and move to suit the number of meeting’s attendees and the shape of the table. The technology moves; it adapts to the user and thus manages to capture the attention of those attending the meeting, both those who are present and those who are attending remotely. Each monitor has a built-in camera and the system adds speakers, microphones, USB and HDMI connectivity, and a built-in CPU so that any collaboration platform can be installed.
We can’t wait to see what the “Demolition Man 2 “meeting room is going to look like!
