CES 2008: BBC Roundup Of The Best Gadgets
While those of us here at the Homotron Labs may not be personally attending CES this week in Vegas (something about a new marble rotunda putting us over budget at the moment) we will be bringing you highlights of CES coverage this week for the consumption of your eyeballs.
The BBC has a neat little overview of some of the cooler gadgets from the show floor, including the Rovio robot by WowWee, a three wheeled espionage robot seen in the picture. The Rovio can be controlled from basically anything that connects to the Internet, has a web camera for live feeds, and is GPS enabled for navigation goodness. The 3 wheels give the little guy some impressive manoeuvrability, as seen in this Gizmodo video.
Other highlights on the show floor today include the first live implementations of wireless HD signal transmission by Western Digital:
The 47-inch television looks like any other but has an in-built receiver that takes a signal from an ultra wideband transmitter plugged into a high definition DVD player.The setup at CES was streaming the James Bond film Casino Royale from a Samsung Blu-ray player.
The firms claims that the secure connection has no lag and is able to stream a range of high definition formats including the highest resolution TV format available today, known as 1080p.
Personally, I also found NPR's efforts to create radio for the deaf incredibly awesome as well:
The consortium is developing radio for the deaf, a counter-intuitive sounding system that translates speech radio into text in real time.At the moment the voice to text conversion has to be done by typists but could one day be automatic.
The information is then broadcast alongside the voice transmission and displayed on a screen on the radio.
The video in the link also mentions that NPR is working on bringing radio to the blind as well, meaning giving blind people access to special digital radio channels that would provide them with audio versions of common daily publications like newspapers and magazines.
I'd like the service myself just for the value of instant transcripts of all the NPR shows I listen to every week!
The best gadgets of CES 2008 [BBC News]
Den Den Boy
Posted to Hot Stuff, In Your Car, In Your House, In Your Pocket, In the News, In the World, On Your Body, On Your Desk on 7 January 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: BBC, CES, NPR, radio, radio for the blind, radio for the deaf, Rovio, Western Digital, wireless HD, WowWee
3D iPhone glasses. Why?
Yes! I have been waiting for years for TVs and their peripherals to go totally wireless. Perhaps this signals the coming of a new era; much fewer messy cables screwing up what is an otherwise pretty flatscreen setup.