“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” has never been less true than during CES. Talk about a no-holds-barred media extravaganza! Much of CES 2008 seemed déjà vu-ish to those of us who have been at past shows, but one differentiator was the turbo charge in media coverage—a boost that sounds implausible given the level of media saturation at previous Consumer Electronics Shows.
Having NBC doing the nightly news from a glass-enclosed set at the front of the Central Hall was the most salient evidence of this year’s media super-saturation, but in reality, an even greater push came from the rapidly multiplying legions of new media journalists covering the show for blogs, video sites and other Web 2.0 outlets. In addition to a press room, there is now a “blogger lounge,” and digital coverage was ubiquitous.
Electronic Designis in the middle of this media revolution. While we had our usual team of tech editors getting the latest from semiconductor vendors in their semi-secluded meeting rooms off the main floor, I was out in the thick of things with the camera crew of Engineering TV, gathering Internet TV programming.
This was a fun, focused mission at the show—ferreting out and shooting cool technologies of interest to the design engineering community. With a show so big and so crowded, I would hate to have a general assignment like “let’s see what’s new at CES.” The first Engineering TV videos from CES are up on the engineeringtv.com Web site now, and you can see new segments each day for the next couple weeks. Technologies I picked to cover include:
- The latest in wireless communications including NFC, ZigBee, Ultra Wideband (UWB) and Z Wave;
- Automotive infotainment integration and voice input, including segments on Microsoft/Ford’s Sync collaboration, and voice control from Voice Box;
- Power innovations including Fulton’s eCoupled induction technology and Horizon’s HydroPak “just-add-water” fuel cells;
- And gesture and face recognition technologies including 3DV Systems’ depth-perceiving Zcam camera and XID Technologies’ 3D face recognition.
By the way, if you had your HD camera on the CES show floor, you can post your “citizen journalist” videos on Engineering TV on our new user-submitted channel. Contact our Engineering TV director Terry Knight at tknight@penton.com for details.
Beyond Engineering TV coverage, I saw what I could of CES, rubbernecking whilst running from shoot to shoot, battling the crowds. The themes of the show—no surprises here—were HD content, bigger video screens, mobility and wireless communications, and media transport in (literally) a huge spectrum of flavors from Bluetooth to Near Field Communications and UWB.
The battle over how media will come into and be routed around the home continues to evolve, with even some of the vendors puzzling over why we really need to stream HD video wirelessly. The answer, it seems to me, is personified by the army of journalists out capturing HD media. True, currently our Engineering TV footage gets transcoded from HD to a lower resolution for Internet streaming, but in the not-too-distant future I’m sure you’ll be watching Engineering TV—and everything else—in HD (and wirelessly to boot). And while the competition rages between sattelite, cable, DSL, fiber, WiMax, etc., the continued rise of P2P file sharing and the user-generated content ensures an HD library that is truly limitless. I noticed that CES had a nascent “content zone” that will undoubtedly continue to expand in coming years.
The answer also rests in what I thought was the most remarkable demo I saw: the LifeWall at the Panasonic booth. The LifeWall uses digital projection across an entire wall and cleverly integrates motion sensing and face- and gesture-recognition to customize and control HD multimedia and a variety of integrated “lifestyle” applications. The face recognition allows TV content and navigation menus to be customized for each family member, while face tracking allows the system to track the viewer’s distance from the wall and to position and size the image for optimal viewing. Gesture recognition allows content navigation without a remote or keyboard. The LifeWall also allows for “virtual decorating,” providing faux features like fireplaces or picture windows with virtual outdoor scenes.
The LifeWall, which is still some time from commercialization, is not to be confused with Panasonic’s record-setting 150-inch plasma TV, also unveiled at the show and scheduled to hit retail shelves in 2009. (MSRP not revealed, but you may need to increase your credit limit for this one!)
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