CEATEC, which is the biggest consumer electronics show in Japan, is always a good place to see concepts and trends from some of the biggest electronics brands. Despite the recession, there were a bunch of interesting to look at, and if you missed last week's coverage, here's your chance to catch-up on the best stuff from CEATEC 09.

3D Stereo TV and projectors

Everyone that makes displays was showing some kind of stereo 3D product or concept. Stereo 3D had been available for years on PC, but now, stereo-3D console games and 3D movie content are becoming available and manufacturers are expecting ("hoping" would be more accurate) for demand to pick up. Of course, there's a premium associated to the latest 3D technology ($$$), but we think that these hopes for fat margins won't materialize. Instead, customers will probably wait for prices to go down to a comfortable level ($1800 for a 50"?) before they buy. 4K2K resolution televisions (don’t miss the Panasonic one) were also on the floor, showing how four times the number of pixels of 1080p could be used to either have larger screens or ultra-sharp ones.

Yamaha certainly has a very interesting speaker on demo at CEATEC. You might be fooled into thinking that it’s just another boring banner, but this 1mm thick (thin?) cloth is actually a directional speaker. To make an advertiser’s dream come true, you won’t be able to hear the sound from the speaker unless you’re standing directly in front of it, thus separate audio files playing just a few feet away from each other won’t overlap with what you’re currently hearing. We certainly wouldn’t mind having a nice jacket with a hood acting as a speaker, don’t you think?

[CEATEC 2009] We visited the Panasonic Center in Tokyo where the company has a huge showroom. The most interesting demo was the "life wall", a wall-sized screen that is Panasonic's vision of how visual our life can get in the future. The wall is interactive and can display any type of data. As you move around, the content follows you. As you get closer or farther from the wall, movies will shrink or expand to maintain a comfy viewing size. It is also possible to check emails and so on. Panasonic also demonstrated games for children that used the coffee table as a touch input surface. All in all, that was an impressive demo and it was hard not to go away with a deep envy of getting one of those installed at home. The future is certainly visual with Panasonic.

[CEATEC 2009] Here’s a CELL-based video encoding accelerator that has enough muscle to compress H.264, 1080p videos at 40fps (compression speed), which is about twice as fast as “real-time” (assuming a 24fps source), so a 1hr movie would take only 30mn to get compressed. Anyone working in broadcast would salivate over this level of performance. Now, this does not include all the edits and effects, but you get the idea: it’s a lot faster than doing it without the card… At $8000, it doesn’t come cheap and you could argue that a $500 GPU can do something pretty close, or may be better (disclaimer: I worked for a GPU company in a past life). The issue with GPUs is the software: it’s often too consumer-ish and not always up to the task for professionals (but that’s changing fast). I can’t vouch that the GigaAcell 180 would do everything that pros want, but it’s worth checking out. The good news is that better parallel computing is coming with DX11 and OpenCL, so stay tuned.

[CEATEC 2009] Kohjinsha has unveiled their latest PA Series MID at CEATEC, and we like the extremely svelte measurements of 161mm x 111mm x 10mm (26mm when extended), tipping the scales at a relatively lightweight 400 grams. You won't be able to use this to get your work deadlines done when you're under pressure, but it ought to provide enough juice to handle just about all of your portable entertainment needs and more, surfing the Web occassionally as well. Detailed specifications nad features are available right after the jump.

[CEATEC 2009] UQ, the sole Wimax carrier in Japan was showing this personal Wi-Fi hotspot device. It connects to the internet via WiMax, and serves as a wireless router for your personal devices. It’s like a MiFi, if you are familiar with that one. When WiMax is not available (in the subway and other “difficult” places), users can connect freely via Wi-Fi, thanks to the partnership between UQ and paid Wi-Fi providers. Coverage is not ubiquitous, but latency and speed should be better than 3.5G. If you wonder, it costs about $40 for a 30-day subscription and there’s no contract!

[CEATEC 209] The Ceatec show arguably had way too many “3D” (stereo) TVs this year. Not only they all have similar functionalities, they also require glasses, which is annoying and not family-friendly. This 3D stereo kiosk does not require special glasses and displays the best stereo 3D that I have seen so far. It can do that, thanks to a pair of cameras that track your eyes, it can adapt the image separation (left+right) optimally. The 3D effect is stunning and the resolution is high enough (I’d say 1280x1024 or so) to be comfortable to use. You can head to the hhi.fraunhofer.de website to get more details, but unfortunately, it’s best to experience it for yourself… in front of the kiosk.

[CEATEC 209] I stumbled on these strange looking speakers while walking in the Hall 4 of the show floor. They look like some kind of water pack, but you are looking at wearable speakers here. Apparently, the manufacturer is aiming at customers who would rather use speakers than headphones, may be bicyclists, for example. Anyway, I tired them on and I was surprised by the sound quality. It sounds good. The speakers are placed right below the user’s ears (black rectangles on the upper chest), so he/she get a strong beam of sound, while people around hear a much quieter output. So, headphones or speakers? Which one are you?

[CEATEC 2009] Korean company Soundgraph is demonstrating how it can control up to 6 small USB displays connected to a single PC. The idea is to turn these displays into dedicated touch devices like a media player, a calendar, photo frame and so on. One master application runs on the computer itself and that is where the smartness happens. It’s pretty cool and I’ll have to find out if it is possible to write our own apps in there. I’d love to see an Ubergizmo app, haha. The displays cost between $200 and $300 and seem to be 5” to 8” large in size.

[CEATEC 09] DoCoMo (a Japanese wireless carrier) was presenting this connected intercom that turns mobile phones into an intercom. If someone rings your doorbell, your phone will ring and you can see and talk to that person via an audio+video connection from your mobile. After that, you can open the door and even turn the lights on and control a few more things in your home. Thanks to DoCoMo, I will finally know if the Fedex guy really stopped by or not.

[CEATEC 09] KDDI was showing this bizarre "joystick" for mobile phones based on a plastic tube that is stuck on the back of a cellphone by a magnet. The idea is to attach this white tube so that the phone's camera can look into it. At the end of the joystick, there's a color pattern (one red and one blue square) that the camera can track by "seeing" any motion of these two squares, and voila, you have a camera-based joystick. Great!? Well, not really. The idea is nice, but in practice, the vision-based motion detection method doesn't work so well for extreme motions because at some point, the camera can't see what's at the end of the joystick if it's bent too much.

[CEATEC 09] Some developers have extended the smartness of the Roomba vacuum robot by using simple 2D barcodes to give it instructions. There are about two dozen codes, and each mean something specific like "clean this place" or "go over there". This works by controlling the Roomba with a computer that is connected to a (plain) webcam that can read the barcodes, but also provides a map of the surroundings. It basically adds a whole lot of smartness to an otherwise relatively dumb (but efficient) robot. I'm not sure how this could ever turn into a product, as not many people would want to have a dedicated computer and install a camera on the ceiling, but the concept is interesting.

[CEATEC 2009] ALPS has created a system that uses the human body electric conductivity to transmit fair amounts of data (streaming music...). It was demonstrated last year, but now major carriers like DoCoMo are investing in it. Basically, if you and I were both equipped with a compatible handset, we could exchange our business cards or other information simply by shaking hands. It could work for Kiosks and subway tickets as well. It gets better, devices like headsets can also benefit from this technology. Can we finally dump Bluetooth for that purpose?

[CEATEC 2009] Murata, the unicyclist robot that uses sensors to stay balanced has been upgraded at this year’s Ceatec in Tokyo. Thanks to new sensors, it can now ride three times as fast (15cm/sec), and handles itself much better in turn (tight turns!). The Murata robot can also detect obstacles and is incredibly accurate. As a demo, they made it ride a narrow (2cm) slant without falling. The robot is used to promote sciences to children.