Panasonic demoed their Smart Home concept at CEATEC this week. Smart Home seems to be an integrated system that controls the electronics in your house, from lighting to air conditioning to multimedia. Even the television will slide to follow you around, which actually looks sort of creepy and desperate.
Pioneer showed off their new Floating Vision technology at CEATEC this year. It’s a system of layers: first, an LCD with built-in computer, then an array of 3D lenses, and finally the “space sensor,” or virtual screen, where you can wave your fingers around and watch the 3D animations react accordingly. But the space sensor can also distinguish between and interact with different objects, like the Microsoft Surface: hold your phone under a falling object, say, and it’ll appear on your phone’s screen with a coupon for that item. Second video after the jump.
The NTT DoCoMo prototype phone shown in the video above has an embedded DLP projector, presumably using an LED light source in order to project a respectable 20- to 25-in. video image on the wall a few feet away. The downside, as you can hear from the dude asking questions (AOL Switched’s Tom Samiljan if I’m not mistaken) is that the phone is large, or at least small but strapped to a real brick of a projector. I guess we’re supposed to admire the image, and wait for the actual mini-projector technology to catch up. [TechPertPanel - YouTube]
Aside from allowing for ridiculous contrast ratios and eye-exploding colour saturation, OLEDs can also be thin enough to be flexible, as Sony is demonstrating here with this crazy 0.3-millimeter-thick concept display at CEATEC. We’ve seen flexible OLED screens before, but 11-inches is a significant step forward. What’s in store when this concept moves into reality? Wearable TV jackets? Flexible laptop screens? TV blankets? Boggling.
Hitachi showed off a cool-looking camcorder concept at CEATEC this week, which adds a Wi-Fi module for streaming video from its hard drive or what’s being shot live over WLAN to your TV. For recorded video it uses DLNA, which means it will work with any number of DLNA-compatible HDTVs or a PS3.
Remote controls might not be the sexiest of gadgets to overhaul, but Panasonic’s done a pretty neat job with this recent revamp. The company demoed a touch-sensitive remote at CEATEC, which features a touchpad on each end of the device and a crowd of buttons in the middle. Instead of using a touchscreen like many of its high-end ilk, the EZ Touch Remote superimposes an image of a traditional remote control on the television screen.
newVideoPlayer("/panasoniclifewall.flv", 506, 380,""); If only the ancient Chinese Had Panasonic’s LifeWall, they could have fended off nomadic tribes with HDTV instead of bricks and battlements. But since we live in the future, we can shut out the rest of the world with television that not only stretches from floor to ceiling, it follows people around the room. Panasonic’s prototype LifeWall, exhibited at CEATEC outside Tokyo, is a room-sized screen that tracks and remembers users with face recognition, which the firm calls You-Know-Me-TV. galleryPost('panasoniclifewall', 3, '');
Digital tech has reinvigorated the 3D dream since the cardboard glasses and headaches of yesteryear. JVC showed off a nifty prototype TV at CEATEC outside Tokyo that converts high-def 2D video into what it calls “pseudo 3D” in real time. With the eyewear on, it takes a few moments for your brain to adjust, and then footage of the Alps in spring starts taking on eye-popping depth. It’s not exactly convincing enough to want to reach out and touch the wildflowers, though it makes regular flatscreens seem, well, very flat in comparison.
