So far the digital revolution has mainly affected the office and workplace, with only a moderate incursion into the home. However, integrated entertainment and information systems are poised to create a more uniform environment. Satellite, radio, copper and optical fibre will be the bearers of bits enabling the digital revolution to reach out to the home, car and pocket. With the exception of the PC and games machines, electronics in the home is fundamentally unchanged since the 1930s. Admittedly the boxes are now smaller and more sophisticated, but only in a cosmetic sense. TV has only seen the addition of a few more scanning lines, colour, and a slightly larger screen, whilst FM and stereo have improved sound fidelity.

In contrast commerce has seen revolutionary changes in business practices with company, national and international boundaries disappearing. We are also creating an information world where the barriers between work and play, home and office are being breached. In fact, the home may become the focal point of many new developments. Watch children playing on a computer game, or using a mobile telephone, or teenagers doing their homework to the accompaniment of pop music, and you see one future for IT. Correlate this with their expectation of higher definition, faster and more sophisticated systems and software, a desire for total communication and immersion, the instant gratification of immediate response, and an increasing rate of delivery with static or falling prices. Then you have an insight into IT and entertainment trends, and drivers from the users of tomorrow.

Now, imagine watching a ball game through a square hole cut in a cardboard box placed on your head, allowing only a restricted view of the event. This is TV today. The small screen, and camera-man restricting and dictating your view - how frustrating. Now imagine a TV screen as large as your living room wall, giving an unrestricted view - and further, you are your own camera-man, you have control. Alternatively, donning a VR headset could see you instantly transported to a specific seat in Yankee stadium. Move your head, and you can see the people either side or behind and in front. Impressively, the seat you occupy could be occupied simultaneously by thousands, or millions of people. We could all attend the game without leaving home. Well, the big screen will probably win, but all the base technologies required are available in research laboratories today.

The safety of incremental change, and the more sure footed HDTV with a surround sound system, will probably forestall such immersive developments. Today the perceived wisdom is that by changing the picture aspect ratio from 4:3 (today's TV) to 16:9 with over twice the definition is all the market requires. However, experiments with children - the customers of tomorrow - show a great desire for a big screen, or VR. The battle lines are thus being drawn between TV, radio and hi-fi based entertainment, and the new, more radical, computer based networks, games and interaction.

The most likely outcome, for both technological and market reasons, is that the computer will ultimately win. TV and it's programmes are fundamentally going nowhere. Many homes now have three TVs, two hi-fi systems, and at least one computer, plus a CAMCORDER, VCR, and electronic games machine. Because much of the technology for these is shared, the manufacturer who integrates them into a single unit can offer a wider set of facilities at a much lower unit cost than the individual items. Linking a TV and PC to a network realises new environments for work and play. For example, Internet access, interactive games and video conferencing can be powerful additions. Given sufficient network bandwidth, distortionless images of people at the correct size and colour, with hi-fi sound, can be realised for a high quality video conferencing.

The likelihood is that the availability of fibre to the home will coincide with that of wall size screens that will allow the living room or office wall to become a transparent tunnel. So my living room could look straight into my mother's 200 miles away. With such a visual and acoustic link between two rooms, the transmission of body language, eye contact, emotion, and the spontaneous interaction of the real meeting place, conference or living room can be created. For the office and home worker, the large screen will not only allow effective human communication, with a real sense of being there, but also a unique data space for interaction with machines.

The key limit and challenge technology now faces is that of the information world itself. In engineering terms the hardware war is over, the software war is well underway, and the information or content war has just begun. The apparently simple tasks of information classification, filing, location, retrieval, valuation, validation, updating, costing, charging and billing, become formidably difficult when databases are both massive and distributed across the planet. Information is now stored in thousands of libraries, publishing houses, universities, and institutions. How are we going to find the phrase of frame we can only vaguely remember, or that vital data for a homework assignment. Perhaps more importantly, how are we going to sort the wheat from the chaff, the good and valuable from the dross? Somewhere in all this data are the radio and TV programmes we would like to experience, as well as computer environments and data we require. We can anticipate smart software agents roaming this information world at our behest, calling at data vaults, finding, sorting, and correlating information on our behalf, to finally deliver it to us over a global information network.

All of this offers a world of communication and information on demand, any time anywhere, any format. The most vital ingredient, however, will be the interface technology. To ensure success and true utility the technology must be friendly and welcoming to anyone between 3 and 90 years old. What we have today will not do. Computer illiteracy has more to do with bad interfaces than the inability of individuals. Voice interaction and activation may turn out to be the most vital step.

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