As well as a way to let computers communicate with peripherals such as keyboards and flash drives, USB is also becoming something of a de facto international power supply standard. Some airlines have a USB connector built into seats that allow travelers to recharge their devices, and in my hotel room here in Las Vegas there’s even a USB connector built into the desk for the same purpose. Kensington are taking advantage of this trend with a smart little number indeed.
If you plug the Kensington Rechargeable Pocket Booster into a powered USB port, it can charge two AAA batteries. These batteries can then be used in your camera, flashlight, or whatever. What’s really neat is that, once unplugged, the Pocket Booster will let you then use these recharged batteries (or even disposable non-rechargeable batteries) to power, say, your cell phone or iPod (you may need an adapter, sold separately). The Pocket Booster is available now, and costs $25. At this price, and given its small size, this gadget should be in every road warrior’s kit.
The Cell is best known as the processor that lies at the heart of Sony’s Playstation 3 games console. But that was never intended to be the only home for the Cell processor, jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. The Cell’s unique architecture make it incredibly good at chewing through multiple streams of multimedia data. Now, Toshiba appears to be finally getting a return on its investment with the unveiling of a prototype Cell-based set-top box for its line of TVs.
The set-top box is designed to attack a knotty problem for TV makers — watching non-HD media (such as a DVD) on a HD television set can often be a poor experience, as enlarging the low resolution material to fill the screen also enlarges flaws and video compression artifacts unnoticeable on earlier generations of TVs. The solution is known as upconverting, and it involves processing the incoming video feed in real time to smooth out flaws and interpolate new pixels to fill in gaps between original pixels. (As the resolution of TVs continues to climb, in a few years we’ll even need to start upconverting 1080p HD television signals!)
Toshiba is very proud of its upconverting technology, and hopes to improve it even further by taking advantage of the Cell’s video-crunching capabilities. The Cell can make three processing passes on a frame of video in the time it takes Toshiba’s current system to make one. The new set top box will also act as a DVR, allowing up to 6 HD channels to be recorded simultaneously, and be able to pull down video from the Internet. Toshiba hope to release the system sometime this year.
Probably no other robot displayed at CES has the potential for touching lives as deeply as Keepon, a robot that is designed to help children suffering from autism.
The Keepon robot is a friendly fellow, capable of bobbing around and scrunching itself up and down. Its bright yellow body sports a face composed of two friendly eyes, and a nose that conceals a camera. Keepon has been used in autism therapy in Japan since 2003. Controlled by a therapist watching through the nose camera, the robot interacts with an autistic child, helping him or her develop fundamental social elements such as learning to pay attention to other peoples’ faces, and how to navigate the rules of joint attention — i.e. when someone we’re talking with turns their head to look at something, we generally take that as a cue to follow their gaze and look at whatever they are looking at. The researcher I spoke to said that some parents had been moved to tears as they watched a child who had such severe autism that they didn’t produce language learn to interact with the robot socially to the point where the child kissed the Keepon.
Keepon can also be operated automatically, where it performs basic functions such as tracking faces, and the robot is also used with non-austistic children as a tool in social development research. Keepon is now being commercialized through BeatBots and is currently targeted towards the researcher market.
Away from glitz and glamor of the big company booths, the seeds that will blossom into the cool gadgets of the next few years are being planted. The next iteration of the ubiquitous USB standard, used to hook up devices including keyboards, cameras, disk drives and even small cannons to a computer, is here.
An engineering demo of USB 3.0 — officially dubbed SuperSpeed USB — tucked away in a distant corner of the Las Vegas Convention Center is the herald of a much zippier future. The SuperSpeed standard was released to the electronics industry only two months ago, and the first products are expected to appear this year, with broad adoption in 2010, and it will turbo charge a lot of devices. With SuperSpeed, you should be able download 8 gigabytes of pictures from a camera in just 8 seconds, or copy 16 gigabytes to a flash drive in 40 seconds. What’s interesting is not just the boost this will give to existing devices, but that there are guaranteed to be unexpected surprises as whole new applications that no one thought of before become possible thanks to the new technology. (Oh, and don’t worry, you won’t have to throw away your current USB devices, the new standard is backward compatible.)
In a case of look-but-don’t-touch, LG teased CES attendees with protoypes of a new watch phone, although the company promised that it would go into production sometime in the later part of this year. This stylish little number clocks in at three ounces and will be able to double as a music player (raising the question — are there any consumer electronics products left that can’t play MP3s?), support bluetooth, and offer up to two hours of talk time between charges.
In case you’ve been living on the Moon and haven’t heard, President-elect Obama wants to delay the date (currently set at February 17) when full-power analog TV broadcasts will cease for ever and ever. The Consumer Union, among others, agrees.
Who strongly disagrees? Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who are currently talking about the future of media and content technology at CES. Shapiro went so far as to mock the president-elect by asking if that was “change you could believe in.” Martin, in more politic language, basically said no–they should hold fast on the date because moving it could: (1) confuse consumers, (2) mess with broadcasters that already have plans to shift their hardware around February, (3) mess with companies that are ready to start their build-out of the vacated spectrum, and (4) erode the government’s credibility as a sensible actor. Martin had a funny story about that last point from the test program in which broadcasters in Wilmington, North Carolina, stopped analog transmissions last September to see how the transition might run when it went nationwide.
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Intel Chairman Craig Barrett’s keynote speech yesterday was a marked departure from the usual electronics-show fare. Rather than talk about the “glitzy glitzy tech we see on the floor of CES,” Barrett focused on the company’s Small Things Challenge, which dares people to get off their butts and help out the less fortunate, and how technology can sustainably improve the lives of the billions of people in developing countries–”simple tech changing lives one step at a time.” He tossed out four examples of how this works in the real world:
1) My favorite project involved a school bus turned into a roving computer lab in Baramati, a village near Pune, India. The computer lab, which has a microwave Internet link and is powered by 12-volt batteries, drives around to different schools, where kids hop on and start learning, learning, learning. (Here’s a short documentary on the project.) The project is sustainably funded by parents who pay $3 per year to have their kids get on the bus. This awesome little idea has steadily grown, and now the’re looking to get 17 more buses.
Barrett said when he visited the town and asked one little girl what her favorite subject was, she said “Tuesday”–the day the bus came to her school. Cute!
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There was once a time when having a director’s personal commentary on your favorite DVD was the best way to hear their behind-the-scenes thoughts on the movie. No longer.
Last month The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan had a live chat with thousands of people who watched the movie synchronously on their own Blu-ray players from their own well-worn couches. Viewers used their remote controls and the interactive format called BD-live (BD=”Blu-ray Disc”) to send in questions; Nolan answered in kind, and could even pause all the viewers’ Blu-ray players when he had to answer the call of nature. (According to one blogger, Nolan said Dark Knight “is a 2-pee movie. I need to make a shorter film next time.” Yeah, just think about what that ending that never ended did to all of us who saw it in the theater, buddy.)
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Growing up, one of the coolest things I ever owned was a microscope, and I spent hours looking at whatever I could find under its lens. The microscope had a single eyepiece though, and what I didn’t care for was the pain in my cheek muscle that came from constantly closing one eye, so I could concrete on what I was seeing through the microscope with the other.
Celestron, perhaps better known to many for it’s astronomy equipment, has made that problem a thing of the past by integrating an LCD screen directly into two models of microscope. The one plctured on the left below is intended for younger children, while the one on the right is a more sophisticated model that costs about $300. This microscope’s optics allow it to magnify up to 400x, and using a digital zoom on top of that allows for a final magnification of 1600x. A built in digital camera allows discoveries to be preserved and shared, and the microscope can also be connected to a computer. Perfect for the budding (or not so budding) scientist in your life.
Can’t find that remote? No problem, at least if an engineering prototype TV system Toshiba are demonstrating at their booth ever makes it to the marketplace. The TV uses an infrared detector to locate a viewer’s hands in three-dimensional space. With the same kind of gestures that Tom Cruise used to control his police computer display in Minority Report, users can select images or video from a content database by zooming and panning through thumbnails. They can then control the playback of video using other gestures–holding your palm upright and then moving it back sharply was the equivalent of clicking on something, while holding up both hands and moving them together or apart zoomed in and out (a motion familiar to anyone who has used the iPhone or iPod Touch devices).
The system still needs a little fine tuning — it became tiring after a while to hold my hands in the right postures that the system could recognize, but it’s a clever idea that could allow for large interactive displays in places where it’s not practical to try and supply a remote or keyboard or use a touch-screen. Imagine using this kind of system in your kitchen to pause, rewind and start a cooking video for example, thereby avoiding getting a remote control covered in whatever ingredients happen to be coating your hands.
