What have Edinburgh Napier, Tom Cruise and Steve Jobs got in Common?, Tuesday February 02 2010

Here in Edinburgh, we’re used to our boffins developing firsts in science and technology, but experts at Edinburgh Napier University have been particularly busy in recent weeks, racking up two rather interesting firsts.

They've teamed up City University of Hong Kong, to create Hong Kong’s first Biofuel Research Centre. It’s modelled on their own centre, a first in its own right, here in the UK.

They’ve also launched a ‘meeting room of the future’ stuffed full of the latest high-tech gadgets.
If you haven’t seen the video yet, the £150,000 room, thought to be the only one its kind in the UK, is a mix of a Tom Cruise film and what we imagine the inside of Steve Jobs head looks like.

The room allows users to fully interact with tables, screens, printers and even the walls (you can draw anywhere on these, perfect for doodlers) and it’s envisaged that these type of intuitive multi-user environments will one day become standard not only for businesses, but for households too. Just think, those routine, everyday arguments over the dinner table could be resolved instantly. You know the type, whether Pi is a rational or irrational number, how oxbow lakes are formed, or whether it was Prometheus or Dionysus that stole fire from the gods.

It won’t all be plain sailing, mind you. We reckon that drastic action would have to be taken to combat one of the negative consequences of the technology: A dramatic rise in incidences of cheating during games of Trivial Pursuit.