The green revolution is upon us. Nearly all corporations, especially in the tech industry, have some kind of green program going on and extolling their parent companies efforts in the field. This revolution applies both ways though. On our way to the idea of a totally interactive home controlled by a home AI smarter than your dog, it is only natural that we don’t immediately have the mind-machine interface that can tell your mood from when you wake up and fixes your coffee before you climb out of bed. Nor do we have a HAL-like talking computer to brief us on our day. We start from the periphery, and this is what we have.

                                             With just three (fake) leaves, taking care of this should be as easy as pressing a button.
 

The “periphery” being the in-house décor, wherein we can go totally electronic – era design and still have that clunky CRT TV with rabbit antennas in the corner of the room. With this eloquently named “Practice Plant”, you can wow your visitors with your techie allusions and still maintain the feeling of a nature-loving kind of guy, if you put said design element far enough so that it actually looks like a plant and not some green mechanical monster. 

                                             Temperature, Humidity, and Oxygen Content - growing stuff with numbers.

This potted plant kinda has leaves; these droop and perk up according to how good conditions are. To determine this, Practice Plant has three “buds” in the middle with color-shifting surfaces and LCDs on the top portion of each bud. Three buds display Temperature, Humidity, and amount of Oxygen; I assume that you simply move your green friend around your abode / open a window / immigrate to another country to coax a change in these indicators. Other than these errr.. “technical” details, it seems that barring any real interior designer or home-maker reading this technological blog of mine, I doubt that any real geek will pass up the chance to own this creative (mis)application of electronic greenery – green helps the eyes relax after a hard day’s staring at the computer screen, ya know.

                                             The Practice Plant not responding to your charms? Reset the obnoxious potted plant!

Some things to take note of in this potted plant – it only has three leaves, total. So even if you fail at taking care of any kind of living thing be it virtual or real, three leaves won’t convey all that much distress to the green thumbed – gardeners out there. Another thing: there’s a convenient “reset” button – just like any virtual pastime, you can just repeat any failure and try to get it right the next time around, just like a save game. Thirdly, note that there are only three buds – for temperature, humidity and oxygen content. Don’t go adding “water levels” as an indicator of this “plant’s” health – electronics and water Do not mix. Which is after all another plus point for the eternally distracted geek who can maintain computers but not anything biological.

                                           This plant represents the "hard" setting - once it's dead, there's no reset or save buton.