Looking at CES and beyond

The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas has winded down and it has left a myriad of new products and technologies in its wake that are leaving the industry buzzing. If last year’s show was all about making existing consumer devices less expensive and greener, the 2011 show focused much more upon the unique and the experimental. Sure, a large portion of the show was devoted to the smartphones, the industry’s golden cow. In particular, offerings focused on the upcoming move from 3G to 4G or LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks that will provide faster Internet access and the ability to run more dynamic internet applications.
Other offerings focused on improving or reinventing existing technology. Toshiba, for example, featured a laptop and a TV that boasted glasses-free 3D technology. The technology is still imperfect, though, as it has to attempt to sense where your eyes are looking in order to display the proper angle with which to best view the 3-D image. Even so, the technology demonstrated one potential path to ignite the still sluggish home 3-D market.
Most of the big CE players focused on part of a connected family of devices in the so-called “beyond the PC” era. Samsung, for example, showcased a television that allows one to operate and share content from a remote control that looks and functions much like a smart phone or small tablet. As part of the connected home, the TV can be used for displaying information sent by other devices including smart phone content and smart appliance information sent to the TV on current status or completed tasks.
There were also less flashy, but nonetheless revolutionary products, such as the Pixeloptics emPower Glasses, the first self-adjusting pair of variable-focus lenses. The glasses actually have LCD crystals built in that can be charged to instantly change the focus strength of the lenses. The glasses, which look like a normal pair of bifocals, can switch between normal focus and reading focus by touching a sensor in the glasses frame. The company has even made it possible for wearers to automatically set this change by activating a miniature in-frame accelerometer (which, by the way, company representatives also say is the smallest accelerometer in the world).
In addition to new CE products, CES hosted several panels and discussions delving even further ahead into the future of the industry. One topic was focused on developing smart devices for the future, which would be able to sense and react to human behavior more dynamically. For example, a smarter TV may provide only a single channel, but by understanding a consumer’s exact preferences and individual habits, it will play everything they want to watch, any time they want to watch it. Other discussions were focused on holographic projection and displays by making them better and ubiquitous in many product areas. Finally, one particularly interesting demo from ADI involved eye controlled devices which, using a simple program, allowed users to control objects on a screen using only their eye movements.
While many of these products and technologies remain just an industry pipe dream — and who knows how many will eventually become viable consumer technologies — they all represent at least an exciting potential avenue of growth for our rebounding industry over the next few months, years, and beyond.