For laundry, why not automate at least a part of it? I'm sure you can build a device above your laundry machine where you can toss your clothes. Once it gets above a certain weight, it can dump your clothes into the machine and trigger something else to add detergent and maybe something to push some buttons to start the thing.
About getting it in the dryer and folding it... I'm not sure, but surely you can come up with something to do part of the work for you.
I think the immersive VR bit is being worked on, but its slow going. I see Avatar as a step in the right direction. One necessary condition for this will be to get proper 3D. Once we can speed up that process, we'll be almost there.
One of the problems with any useful laundry automation schemes I've seen thus far is that they tend to have some real-estate specific requirements (laundry chute, for example) and also tend to require that you own your own home, or at least rent an apartment with a washer/dryer inside, which is not feasible in San Francisco by any means.
An awesome "laundry bot" would:
- Retrieve items from a laundry bin
- Scan the fabric to determine color and type for sorting (knowing to have a dry-clean bin, a woolens bin, a whites bin, a color cottons bin, etc)
- Transport the dirty garments to the cleaning facility
- Perform proper cleaning operations (washing, folding drying)
- Return the laundered garment
The act itself might be triggered by scales or pressure sensors in laundry bins.
It just doesn't seem like it should be that hard. I'm surprised that industrious tinkerers haven't already automated the repetitive, thankless tasks in our lives that we tend to hate like laundry, vacuuming, window washing, (lawn maintenance for you suburbanites, etc.
About getting it in the dryer and folding it... I'm not sure, but surely you can come up with something to do part of the work for you.
I think the immersive VR bit is being worked on, but its slow going. I see Avatar as a step in the right direction. One necessary condition for this will be to get proper 3D. Once we can speed up that process, we'll be almost there.
Other stuff... I dunno.