Mobitrends

Central hall was definitely overwhelmed by 3D TVs. Each major manufacturer including Samsung LG, Sony had their TVs showcased and happy visitors wearing glasses to try them out.
As you might now, there is a lot going on in the 3D movie world right now, standards for content creation and delivery are being heavily discussed by working groups that got fairly active in 2008, technologies for content creation are now ready and in 2008 there were 10 movies done in 3D while this figure is expected to at least double in 2009.
Vendors are now trying to get this experience into the homes.
To achieve that there are currently 3 technologies:

• Shutter glasses, like the one sold by Nvidia, by doubling the frequency of the display from 60Hz to 120Hz to get alternatively the image for the left and then for the right eye. Requires an emitter to send the sync signal and batteries in the glasses
• Polarized glasses, like in good old Disneyworld movie theaters. No sync and batteries requires here.
• beamsplitter surface on top of the screen that basically sends every next pixel to the other eye. This requires being really in front of the TV and reduces its resolution

While those are probably valid solutions for an enhanced movie experience (while I still regret there is no way to be *inside* the movie), they really *POORLY* apply to video games in my opinion. As a gamer I expect immersion in the game and the 3D effect itself is not what truly matters in terms of game experience, it’s the availability to get immersed into a 3D environment with free move within the game.

Asus is expanding its “Eee” line to uncovered market areas… such as gaming. We can wonder how legit Asus is to do that, especially when you see that this product looked so alone in his corner of the huge stand (not even a produt manager to demonstrate it).

It seems like Parrot is getting serious about getting into consumer electronics. Big designer brand names, shiny products (Big iPhone speakers by Stark and shiny photoframes….). While Parrot is drawing most of its revenue from OEM business with car manufacturer they have been trying for quite some time to get into mass market Consumer Electronics, but their products have been too high-tech till now and thus scary for the average end-user who doesn’t really understand why a speaker should be bluetooth and WiFi.

As I was in preparatory and engineering school, I used the old HP48G calculator that I tuned by increasing the built-in memory by soldering additional chips within the beast (lots of effort to save the few hundred euros they were charging for 128kb extensions). This calculator was exceptional, especially the touch of the key that would firmly resist pressure until they would press and make contact with a 100% accuracy. Then came the HP49G with rubber keys that were crappy and that almost had HP cut off its calculator line. Now they’re back for good and better then ever with 2 new high-end calculators (HP39GS and HP50G) of very good quality !

Had an interesting talk about stereo vision support by Nvidia today. As you might now, Nvidia has been releasing last year a driver that supports 3D stereo vision through shutter glasses. The previous version of this driver was released 2 years before, as such the Nvidia policy over that feature was far from clear. When I contacted Nvidia a couple months ago about that they would answer “we’re not planning on integrating this feature into the main trunk driver”. Today it seems they changed sides.
They were showing on their booth branded shutter glasses that have been released yesterday and can be bought online here. The glasses retail at 199USD and require special 120Hz monitors to work properly (only 2 models currently available) and they are selling a bundle glasses + monitor at 598USD.
When I asked about eyewear devices support such as Vuzix’s, surprisingly the answer was “we want to keep it mainstream, we thing eyewear devices are not mainstream but shutter glasses are”, and “eventually we may find a way to deal with the vendors for supporting their devices”. This is pretty disturbing as I really don’t see changing your monitor to be able to wear shutter glasses any mainstream an approach… But what’s for sure is that the stereo support will now be a standard within Nvidia’s drivers… an other piece in the stereo 3D games puzzle!

I attended Showstoppers yesterday evening and this show within the show was like a blast. Lots of big and small companies sharing the space with enthusiasm and showing their latest innovations and technologies. Lots of press and cool people were attending (if you look at the pic you can see Walt Mossberg walking in front of my objective).

Vuzix let me try their latest augmented reality eyewear devices, which from an optical prospective is a real piece of fine jewelry. Also Paul Travers was kind enough to share a bit of his experience with both Forte Technologies (the mythical VFX1 device) and Vuzix bringing me a lot of hope that 2009 will be the year when those eyewear devices will meet a large enough market.

Drobo convinced me that their storage solution is really what I deeply wanted.

Skype announced that they are coming to the iPhone app store this year (thanks olivier for grabbing the info).

All in all great event and highly energizing.