Exceptional Innovation's Redesigned Homepage and Amazing Products
Exceptional
Innovation | Exceptional Innovation has
recently redesigned there website and put up more product information in the
process.
For those who don’t know Exceptional
Innovation is the current king of the connected home with Media Center
sitting at the center. Life|ware is the where
it all starts, allowing you to control your either house from your Media Center
remote control. Lighting, security,
cameras, weather, multi-room/zone audio, is all here controlled via Life|controller
and Life|link.
Life|point (aka
Life|touch) enables you to have small touchscreens (8.9" or 12.1") around your home and
still control everything with just the tap of a screen. Included feature called Life|scenes is really
neat and demoed to the video linked to below.
Basically, you can walk into your house and just tap “I’m Here” and
everything from music, to lights and shades, and even your oven (which doubles
as a refrigerator to keep food cool before cooking) turns on to just the right
setting.
Life|storage
is a very interesting product, and as the name implies there is plenty of storage
in here. What’s more interesting is that
the product runs on Microsoft Windows Storage Server OS. It’s got 2TB worth of storage (1.5TB is RAID5
for backup/redundancy). 2TB’s should be
a good starting point to hold your media, but the final product in Exceptional Innovation’s lineup is the most
impressive.
For most of us we slap a TV tuner or two into your PC. Life|vision
takes it too the next level, including four SD tuners in a rackmount case with 250GB
of onboard storage. When paired with the
boave Life|ware
and Life|point
touchscreens, you can watch all four feeds at the same time on the same
screen. Media Center
itself doesn’t support Picture-in-Picture (PiP) and even if it did Life|vision
would put it to shame. You can select to
watch any of the four live streams and bring it up fullscreen with just the tap
of a finger.
The majority of Exceptional
Innovation’s products really show both the power of Media Center
and the power of Microsoft’s Windows XP platform as a whole. The Life|point
touchsreens and Life|controller
both run on Windows XP Embedded (XPe), and as I already mentioned Life|storage
runs Windows Storage Server.
I’m waiting for the day that I have time to check out Exceptional Innovation’s products first hand. They will be at the Media
Center Boot Camp at EHX showing off everything and even a preview of what’s
coming for Vista Media Center.
Exceptional Innovation’s
looks like the whole package that I have been waiting for since I first started
using Media Center several years ago. Between Microsoft and Exceptional Innovation
they have really showed how much a product can grow to fit the custom
market. I still remember the day where Media Center
supported just a single SD tuner. Now,
not only does Media
Center itself support (officially)
four tuners but products like Life|ware and Life|point wrap it all up in the
perfect package.
Oh, for anyone wondering
how scalable Life|ware is, last months CE Pro
has a piece on Life|ware 1.0.2 which includes the most amazing lineout
ever. Here’s a rundown of what’s all in
this beautiful 12,000 square-foot home. . .
- 17 HP Media Center PC’s (12 of which are z558’s)
- 4 slim Desktop PC’s
- 1 HP laptop
- 12 Life|point touchscreens
- 3 Xbox
360’s
- 36
Audio Zones (Russound CAV 6.6)
- 22
Panasonic IP cameras
- And a
whole lot more!
Everything is controlled by Life|ware, everything integrated
into Media Center.
If anyone out there is looking for a whole house Media Center-based
solution, I would check out Exceptional
Innovation’s Life|ware. If I can ever get
to the point where I could afford such a thing, I will be doing the same. =) There is an amazing video of how everything
can integrate together now on Exceptional Innovation's
Homepage.
