It’s the stuff of science fiction, but personalizing our environments and living spaces using our technology is the mast that we hoist our civilization on. The cloud has been big on virtualization and separating our data from our home computers, divorcing it from big hardware and allowing any computer terminal to become a window into a sort of artificial memory. Increasingly, people don’t just keep information in their heads: we keep our knowledge, notes, schedules, and other elements of our lives in the cloud.

Alex Williams went on a tour of a Microsoft digital house and wrote about it on ReadWriteWeb that exemplars how virtualization could extend into the real world in ways that people might not have at first suspected:

Microsoft Home is designed to be the model of what a home may look like in five to ten years. It’s a home that has the elements of touch and gestures to display contextual data on walls, counters and tables. It is an example of the connections between devices and physical objects. It shows how intelligent systems change the reality for how a room functions and people interact. It’s an environment that has a deeper relationship with data which in turn affects our preconceptions about reality…

Digital wallpaper in a teenage boy’s room can change when Grandma comes to visit and the room becomes hers.

Smart environments are nothing new to the science fiction community, but data and reality are already inextricably connected. We already tend to arrange our living spaces around ourselves every time we visit them; we just do it by hand and over time, whereas with environments preset to react to our devices (such as smartphones) and the cloud we could bring a totally different experience.

In fact, what comes to mind from the description of the wallpaper and the room switching between a teenage boy’s rock-and-roll paraphernalia along the walls and a grandmother’s plush quit horses and images of rolling Parisian cityscapes reminds me of old commercials involving hotels for the rich and swanky. Imagine, if we would, going on long business trips and walking into a hotel room that used Near-Field Communications to establish a secure connection with our smartphone, queried our preferences in the cloud as to our ideal room environment; then, while we used our smartphone to unlock the door (as we already paid for it with our phone) the room changes its lighting, modifies the temperature, and adjusts the color of the walls to fit our favored décor.

All of the above is possible with very little modification from what house and hotel rooms already manage.

We could even load our favorite shows into an app in the cloud, permitting the television set in the living room to immediately check to see what’s currently on (or what’s available on demand) and display that in a context menu on screen. Logitech might already be poised to bring exactly this to us—if not for the home, why not also posh hotels?

The cloud may allow us a vast amount of information storage and retrieval, but that’s nothing if it cannot interface with us. Smartphones and tablets will become that interface and the applications that run on them that connect us to the rest of the world will become our bridge between all the data we might choose to store in the cloud and the technology of our civilization.

Hotels might be the first-best place to implement and try this sort of thing out—aside from the home—who else would like to see something familiar every time they rattled a key in the lock but the work-out-of-everywhere-but-home business person who is constantly on the road. With the cloud, we could take the superficial significance of home with us everywhere we went and help ease the region shock of being one place at 10am and suddenly somewhere else entirely by evening.