Roland Tellzen and Agencies | January 15, 2008
GADGET fiends got more of a glimpse of the future than they bargained for at last week's annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Aljon Go, a product specialist with Gibson Guitar, demonstrates the Robot Guitar. Picture: Jae C. Hong/AP
A leopard print Taser gun, right, and 1GB music player holster. Picture: Jae C. Hong/AP
ASUS Eee PC notebooks in different shades. Picture: Paul Sakuma/AP
A Cruzin Cooler, a motorized scooter with a cooler and a cup holder. Picture: Jae C. Hong/AP
Panasonic unveiled the world's largest plasma HDTV. The 150-inch TV is 3.35m wide and about 1.85m high
Sony's egg-shaped MP3 players called Rollys. Picture: Jae C. Hong/AP
A retractable 1 GB USB memory key embedded with Silver Shade crystals called "Active Crystals" is presented by Philips and Swarovski. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP
Vivian Lien, of ASUS marketing, demonstrates the Eee PC. Picture: Paul Sakuma/AP
Myvu personal media viewers. Picture: Robyn Beck/AFP
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The show is ostensibly a forum for electronics manufacturers to show their wares for the coming year, but as usual most interest is in technology that will revolutionise gadgets years beyond.
Microsoft's Bill Gates, for example, in his keynote address, dwelt largely on future technology that will be ubiquitous and almost unseen - in tables, televisions, cars, watches and "things yet to be invented".
In his final presentation to CES as a full-time chief of Microsoft - he plans to retire from day-to-day operations in July - he outlined a vision of a second "digital decade" of devices that respond to sound and touch, rather than conventional input devices.
To highlight his vision, he chose a demonstration of his company's innovative Surface technology - basically a table-top computer interface.
Originally announced last June, Microsoft's Surface technology enables any flat surface, such as a counter top or coffee table, to be transformed into a computer screen.
Images and files can be called up, resized and manipulated by fingertip control, and devices such as telephones can communicate with the computer simply by being laid on the surface.
Mr Gates, for example, demonstrated how he could custom-design a snowboard using the table, then send the design to a manufacturer by placing his mobile on it.
"Soon computers will be in the desk, not just on them," he said.
This vision of a future in which common furniture and devices bypass dedicated computers to become communications and computing devices in their own right was seconded by the chief executive of chip manufacturer Intel, Paul Otellini.
"The internet is a disruptive force that is changing the consumer electronics industry, I submit we are just getting started," he said. "The next generation is the internet coming to us instead of us going to the internet."
To prove his point, he demonstrated a prototype handheld gadget combining satellite technology, translation software, image recognition and mobile internet.
He showed how it could be used to pinpoint exactly where in the world a user was at a particular time, download maps and language information and act as a combined electronic tour guide, translator and local business reference guide.
To fulfil the promise of "personal internet" people would carry around reliable broadband internet access wherever they went.
"Eventually, we will blanket the globe with wireless connectivity." He cautioned that such devices would require more computing power than now available.
"Doing things like real-time translation and augmented reality will require more powerful processors that are also using less power."
Mr Otellini's device might be a designer's dream, but more conventional handheld gadgets were plentiful at the show.
The 3M Corporation demonstrated a tiny handheld device, expected to go on the market in coming months, that allows users to project digital television shows or videos on the internet or puts advertising and multimedia presentations on walls.
The 3M version of the gadget combines a luminous diode LED and a liquid crystal display to project light through a lens.
Photographic specialist Polaroid showed off a tiny printer, the size of a deck of cards, that can be carried in a pocket and produce instant prints of images from digital cameras or mobile phones.
The printers are due to go on sale soon for $US150 ($168).
Once connected to a phone or camera by Bluetooth wireless or USB port, the printers need less than a minute to churn out 5cm by 7.5cm pictures to be peeled off a backing and used as stickers.
Even the television set got the handheld makeover at CES, with companies such as Motorola displaying pocket-sized mobile sets capable of playing live broadcasts, on-demand clips via the internet or digital programs saved on a video recorder.
"We'll have everything in an all-in-one device: images, video, global positioning system, media player and television," Motorola spokesman Ebin Ephrem said. He expected the gadget to be commercialised in Europe within six months.
At the other end of the scale from such pocket-sized screens, televisions were also one area at CES where bigger was better. In keeping with the trend towards ever larger screens for home cinemas, Panasonic demonstrated the world's largest plasma television screen, a 150in (381cm) high-definition behemoth.
More conventionally, Pioneer for its part showed off its latest generation Kuro LCD screen, a 127-cm concept model claimed to be the world's thinnest and blackest.
But the large number of LCD and plasma sets at CES had to share space with a new rival to viewing technology - TV screens using ultra-thin Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technology.
OLED technology is claimed to enable manufacturers to produce screens almost paper-thin, and bendable to boot.
Sony, for example, showed off an OLED TV sporting a thickness of only 3mm.
Dutch electronics manufacturer Philips, for its part, took a different tack, demonstrating a TV set capable of displaying images in three dimensions without the need for special glasses.
The Philips model instead splits the TV signal into different images to hit different eyes.
"It can see a little blurry at first, but your eyes need to adjust to it,'' Bjorn Teuwsen of Philips said as he and others gazed at a model on the CES show floor.