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CEATEC 2009 in 6 minutes: TV tech

Julien Cayzac — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:16:00 +0000

CEATEC is « the most comprehensive exhibition of cutting-edge information technology (IT) and electronics ». Every year the world's most advanced technologies, products and services make their international debut here.

Here is a short video recap, about 6-minute long, on what got shown at this year's event when it comes to TV-related technologies. I hope you'll enjoy it.

Body-Controlled Interactive Display by MMBI

Julien Cayzac — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:07:00 +0000

Multimedia Broadcasting, Inc had an interesting installation at CEATEC 2009, where it was presenting an user interface concept that uses people's body motion.

Hundreds of pictures were shown on an interactive wall, and would get magnified every time they were intersecting with a visitor's body. People's silhouettes were being captured by a camera placed in the upper right corner.

Multimedia Broadcasting, or MMBI was cofounded in 2006 by a consortium of Japanese companies interested in the future of digital mobile television, some of the best known being NTT Docomo, SKY Perfect, Nippon Broadcasting System and Fuji TV.

With the end of analog TV broadcasting in 2011, its primary mission has been to plan the reallocation of these frequencies to mobile multimedia broadcasting, as well as to perform research for new possible services built around its ISDB-Tmm standard. Current Japanese mobile phones can use a subset of the digital terrestrial television spectrum, but in July 2011 this is all going to change and mobile TV users should expect to be offered a whole new range of multimedia services.

Eye-controlled music player by Docomo

Julien Cayzac — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:14:00 +0000

NTT Docomo presented at CEATEC 2009 a pair of concept earphones capable of detecting your eyes' movement by measuring changes in your eyeballs' electric field.

The electric current flowing through our nerves creates an electric field that can be measured by the electrodes put inside the earphones. The software can then deduce eyeballs motion by analyzing the gathered measurements, and match it with a pre-recorded set of moves used to identify a task to perform.

In the demo, the system was getting used for navigating in a playlist and perform the common tasks you want to do when using a music player: skipping a track, pausing/resuming, changing the volume…

If you ask me, they should have hired the guy from the Osaka University who created the Mimi switch, as it's much more powerful and it's not limited to eye motion.

3D Haptic Solution by NiCT

Julien Cayzac — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:31:00 +0000

Developed at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, this device augments your 3D experience with a sense of touch by using motors to send 3D-accurate force feedback to a stylus-like controller while manipulating an object on a 3D display.