It used to be that watching old sci-fi movies was the best way for geeks to grok the future. But if you were at last week’s Intel Developer Forum, you got to see some of the promises only hinted at in movies like Total Recall live and up close. This included seeing interactive wall-sized displays and the remaking of the digital home.

Intel’s new CEO Paul Otellini and digital home boss Don McDonald gave their vision and it is almost as disturbing as Paul Verhoeven’s ideas of Martian landscapes. While I didn’t make it to the show, my colleague Patrick Schmid and Wolfgang Gruener covered the show for us. And hearing about Intel’s plans clearly got him as bug-eyed as someone left outside an airlock. Hearing him tell it, Intel painted an almost frightening picture how the capabilities of its renovated processors may be used in a future digital home.

Wolfgang’s issue with what was presented is that our future family life would have little in common with a typical scenario of today. Availability of various digital devices, ubiquitous broadband and wireless connections will enable every family member to be engaged in their own digital worlds. Just like in Total Recall , we would become trapped inside our own heads.

For example, Dad would watch his movies and football games in front of the big screen in the family room, Mom has her own TV in the kitchen to watch soap operas while cooking dinner and the kids disappear in their rooms with their portable multimedia players and consume any digital audio and video content that can squeeze through broadband lines.

Call us both old-fashioned, but being dads ourselves - and in his case with two young children - this is not what we imagined our future family life to be. Intel’s vision comes as a surprise and appears to be off track, especially since the company also outlined applications for "user aware" computing that is aimed to support the user and potentially enhance the social component of IT. But it was exactly this social component that was lacking at the demos. Instead, there is a clear social separation in Intel’s demo family.

Yes, there was a lot else discussed at IDF last week, including some very vague announcements of Intel’s next-generation micro-architecture. This so far no-name technology will serve as the foundation for Intel’s mobile, desktop and volume server processors until the end of this decade. There is no doubt - assuming Intel will follow through with its promises - that this is Intel’s biggest leap forward in processor technology since the introduction of the first P6 Pentium back in 1995. Half the power consumption, of today’s Pentium D with some performance increase - who can complain about this ?

Those of you that follow Intel closely will see that this is a complete turnabout for them. Indeed, it’s a 180 degree turn for Intel and it’s a good one for the company and every computer user out there. Their strategy seems to be taken from another processing vendor’s playbook, namely AMD. Having low-powered CPUs is something we tend to expect from the Texans, and we are glad to see Intel finally getting with the program.

While it is easy to get excited about the new processors, I am less than sure that having a separate screen for every family member is the way that I - and Wolfgang - want our families to go. We hear from our Japanese colleagues that Intel’s vision may fit some Asian lifestyle ideals, but here in the U.S. ? I am not so sure. Either I am getting just too old to be able to understand how IT can enhance family life, or Intel’s digital home team just got carried away and should spend some more time with U.S. and European families.

Sure, the family members shown in the demo IDF presentation were completely happy with reduced personal communication and increasing reliance on individual computer and entertainment devices. And those digital picture walls that could change images and sound depending on a user’s mood were way cool. Maybe we are all looking for a totally digital household, and just don’t know it yet. But maybe we are going down the wrong path, towards something that is almost as scary as Arnold’s (or Quaid’s) Martian "Recall" vacation.