The “3D LED Wall” is on show at the International Broadcast Equipment Exhibition in Japan, and really highlights just how much of a boner Sony has for 3D right now. They’ve got 3D laptops, TVs and Blu-ray players planned, and don’t forget new games and a firmware update will bring 3D to the PlayStation 3 next year, too.

[TechOn via Engadget]

24,000 full-colour, super-thin LEDs, 4000 Swarovski crystals and enough iPod batteries to keep everything glowing for about an hour. This picture doesn’t do the Galaxy Dress justice, but the video comes close.

This gorgeous thing was designed by Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz and they say that it’s the “the largest wearable display in the world”. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that I wanted to cry when I read that the dress went straight from the sewing room to the museum mannequin, without ever being worn by a real woman. [Wired]

Rear projection TV were increasingly popular back in the 90s and early this decade thanks to their large screen sizes and relatively affordable price tags – especially when compared to the early asking price of LCD and plasma displays. They use three main technologies to project the image from inside the body to the screen: CRT, LCD and DLP.

But unfortunately, the technology was held back by its shortcomings and the dropping price of LCDs and plasmas. Because they projected an image, they were deep, needing the space inside the body to be able to throw the image from the projector to the screen. That meant they couldn’t be wall mounted, and tended to take up a lot of space.

Nowadays, there’s nary a rear projection TV to be found in the shops. Most of the major TV players have stuck their flags in the plasma or LCD camps (or both) and left rear projection behind. The noted exception is Mitsubishi, who have further developed the technology with the introduction of lasers, which both improves picture quality and lessens the necessary depth of the TV – their LaserVue sets are actually wall mountable. Still, that doesn’t mean that the technology hasn’t been superceded – despite having a great few years when most big TVs sold were big and bulky, these days you’re safer to go a flat panel TV.

History of TV is Giz AU’s month-long look back at the development of the world-changing medium and its influence on our daily lives.

Besides processing power, price and battery life improvements, our preferences for gadgets and the direction of those desires point towards three things: Richer displays, more seamless inputs and smaller packages — the first two being in direct conflict with the last. Looking at where we’ve been and where we are, I don’t think we can keep pursuing these goals without going gadget prosthetic.

Now here’s a trip: For the first time this decade, design choices are being made to limit resolution in screens to show mercy to the human eye. Apple’s recent iMac revision increased the desktop monitor’s pixels per inch rating to about 110. That’s the equivalent of laptop levels of density, but on a big 27-inch screen, and it was so sharp it hurt. Any desk jockey can tell you that as displays get sharper, the strain goes up. On mobiles, which are already the most pixel dense of the gadget kingdom, designers are frequently bashing into conflicting goals of fitting lots of pixels onto pocketable devices. Resolution-independent operating systems (that rely on vector-based graphics) are important but if we don’t take displays inside the human body, gadgets can’t get much smaller — there’s no way for them to become as pixel-rich as desktops while continuing to get smaller than they already are.

The the idea for hybridised HUDs featuring reality and computed interfaces has been around for ages. Science fiction has already dreamed up what it is we want to see in animations like Ghost in the Shell. But the recent explosion of augmented reality apps — powered by smartphones with directional compasses, internet connections, location awareness, cameras and the power to draw data-driven overlays — are simply prototypes for real HUD and in-eye/mind displays. It’s not a conceptual problem as much as it is a question of how.

Keyboards and buttons are easier to understand as a limitation, as we type on increasingly baby-finger sized keyboards on smartphones with appendages that look like hot dogs. Keyboards just need to go away. Towards that trend, software keyboards may be error-prone but when used by the proficient, the typing is way faster and the devices are way smaller. Further away from traditional keyboards, Microsoft Research’s projects point towards gesture and voice commands. I don’t see how we could get full work days done that way though, and there’s the rub. There’s not even a good concept for controlling a PC to the level we need to without keyboards and pointers now. Mind control is a joke.

In user-interface design, we’ve always trended towards the invisible. Instead of seams, we want the seamless. Instead of four clicks, any given major task is better with three. Maybe one day, none — the blink of an eye. Funny enough, the only mentally controlled gadgets these days are toys. And usually the low-end QVC valley where high-end tech ends up after dripping down from the peak of military or space program development to gadget fiends, and finally their kids. I would guess the sloppy capabilities of such toys, like the Mindflex Brainwave, make it inappropriate, unsafe and unusable for anything but hovering a ball in mid air.

It’s funny looking back at attempts of strap-on computing. We always thought these clunky setups — “wearable” PCs Velcro’d to our arms or slung over our backs — were the predecessors to in-body computing. I’ve long assumed that getting to prosthetic gadgets was an issue of micronisation. “When we can fit a computer into the profile of a Bluetooth headset, people will use ‘em,” we thought. But it’s clear to me that it’s about the interface; the inputs and outputs.

Gadgets don’t have much more room for revolutionary improvement unless we bypass our own natural limitations of fingers meant to peel bananas and eyes designed to spot prey and predators, and get these damn things we love and depend on so much routed directly into our brains.

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

As great as it seems, this concept is seriously creepy because it powers itself by converting the glucose and oxygen found in blood into electricity. But somehow getting your blood sucked by a gadget is worth it for the endless potential applications. I’d probably just end up using it to moderate comments, but what would you do first with your implant? [Core77 via Geekologie]

The neatest thing about this demo isn’t that 20 iPod touches have combined to make a giant touch display; the neatest thing is that the technology can scale.

Both the proof-of-concept video and the above illustration are by Japanese design house PROTOTYPE. Their giant hive display can begin a chain reaction when someone touches one iPod, or it’s even possible to “drop” some items between iPods (I don’t read that as full drag-and-drop capability).

Unfortunately, I have many more posts to write today, so I can’t calculate the size of a 16×9 display made up of the 50 million or so iPhone/iPod touch handsets out there. But I’m sure that someone in the comments simultaneously loves maths and hates their job enough to make this numeric factoid enter our existence. [Mongoose via technabob]

iStartedSomething has videos showing the prototype in action, and it looks like it’s got quite some potential. I can’t wait until displays like this are sold so that I can control everything with foolish hand-waving. [iStartedSomething via Slashgeat]

I was pretty skeptical about Kohjinsha’s dual 10.1-incher when I first wrote about it, but it actually looks quite practical in this video. The second display simply slides out behind the first, like on GScreen’s Spacebook and Lenovo’s W700.

It’s slightly thicker than a normal netbook, but the insides are pretty much the same: Windows 7, 1.6GHz AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 processor, maximum 4GB RAM and 160GB hard disk. How battery life would be affected remains to be seen.

Matt thought the Microsoft Surface Sphere was the trippiest multitouch thing ever. I agreed with him until I saw this insanely wicked Interactive Multitouch Sphere by London design house Seeper. [Seeper via Likecool]