Category: Platforms

Sound Associates’ Personal Captioning System (PCS) is a wireless handheld device featuring a colour LCD that deaf patrons can take to their seat. Captions are sent to the device synchronised to the show’s lighting cues, so the text is always in sync. The handheld uses a light polarising filter so theatregoers sitting nearby are not distracted.

The system is currently being used for the musical Big River at the American Airline Theatre in New York.

Sound Associates
American Broadcasting Corporation on Personal Captioning in Chicago

Sony are releasing a new personal video recorder in Japan with enough disk space to store more than two weeks of video at its lowest quality setting.

Going on sale in Japan only, the $1400 personal video recorder doesn’t feature a DVD drive, but can be connected via Ethernet to the Vaio PC range, using “Sony’s Click To DVD” software.

Users can edit the footage stored on the PVR and then make their own DVDs, or store programmes off line permanently.

The EX11 has three quality setting which equate to High Quality (114 hours, 9Mbps), Standard (171 hours, 6Mbps) and Extended Play (3Mbps). The recorder makes use of an EPG for automatic recording and is equipped with two tuners and two MPEG2 encoders, allowing users to record two programmes simultaneously. Also useful is the inclusion of a memory stick slot for displaying photographs.

The PVR features two analogue and one D1 digital video output. Interestingly, Sony have chose Linux as the PVR’s OS. This seems to be increasingly common on this type of platform – TiVo recorders use an older Linux kernel.

PC World link

Slashdot link

The Epson PowerLite Home 10 projector, priced at $1300 (£820), is designed to appeal to home users by getting the best out of widescreen DVDs and HDTVs. It has a native resolution of 854 x 480, and can switch aspect ratios as necessary.

Previous “budget” projectors have suffered from washed out colours (think how your PowerPoint slides can appear in presentations sometimes) but the newly designed 3-LCD elements that make up the projection technology have a reported contrast ratio of 700:1. These 0.5 inch LCDs were seen earlier in the year in Epson’s EMP-S1 business projector.

Epson are really going after the home market with the new PowerLite – the casing is styled to look good in a domestic setting, and it’s designed to sit easily on your coffee table without all that fiddling with getting the feet at the right angle by propping your annual report under them.

If you’re lucky enough to have a 25 foot living room, you can enjoy a 300 inch picture whilst watching Legally Blonde.

MacWorld review link

The new revision of AIBO, the ERS-7 will soon be available in Europe.  Sony’s recreational robot has been extremely popular, despite its high cost, since the introduction of the ERS-110 in 1999 – the series has sold a reported 45,000 units. As the various models have retail prices between £800 and £1200, this has obviously been a success for Sony, and indeed become a cultural icon.

The new features on this unit include a more expressive face display (the “Illume-Face”), and a restyled casing.  More dramatically, the ERS-7 features an improved memory that enables the robot to retain and develop its personality over its lifecycle. We’re wondering if there will be a tearful moment in the house when AIBO has to go and “live on a farm” when he gets a bit older.

Sony claim the personality development routines are a significant step in artificial intelligence.

The new AIBO is also the best connected ever – using a built-in wireless LAN, he can connect to PCs and other mobile devices.  His nose camera allows him to perceive his environment three times better than before, distinguishing shapes, patterns and even faces. He can send photographs of his surroundings and your au pair to your mobile phone.

We would have liked to have brought you some links on AIBO hacking, but Sony used the DCMA to bring all the sites down.

You’ll be able to see the new AIBO in the “flesh” if you’re in Paris at the weekend at the Sony Dream World exhibition.

AIBO’s home page: http://www.aibo-europe.com/

ZVUE!, a handheld video player that has been spoken about for a while has now been publicly demonstrated. It plays MP3s, videos and displays photographs, all for $99.

It is thought that the price is kept so low by only allowing video in the proprietary HHE format to play. This content will need to be bought direct from HandHeld Entertainments, the company behind it. They plans to have it in the shops by October.

Audio Interview with CEO & story link
Hand Held Entertainment

Using a wireless 802.11b, WiFi connection to a computer, this $249 (£159) DVD player can also pull photo’s, audio and video from your PC, after installing media server software on your PC. Media files on the network can be navigated using the player’s remote control, through a Windows Explorer-like interface on the TV.

Not all media format are supported. On the audio side, the player supports MP3 and WMA audio, but not Ogg Vorbis or AAC formats. Only MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video formats are available for playback, but surprisingly there is no support for AVI (including DivX), MOV, or WMV files. JPEG images are supported but TIFF or BMP are not – which isn’t much of a problem.

The review reports the delivery of photos and music files worked well over the wireless link but video struggled, which sound like a bandwidth problem. It’s not clear from the review what the quality of the wireless connection was and it may have been that the DVD player was placed a long way away from the PC holding the media, and bandwidth delivery could have been patchy.

It sound like a reasonable initial start for Gateway in the media hub arena but the media server software still have a few bugs that need to be ironed out.

Link