Impress Watch’s coverage of Day 2 of CEATEC JAPAN 2004 continues, as we “acquire” more images from them to show to you, valued Gizmodo reader. As is usually the case with the second days of conventions, this day was much more low-key than yesterday. In fact, most of the coverage today won’t be on products you’ll be able to purchase before the end of the year – but that’s not to say it’s boring, by any means.
Since the coverage today is pretty broad, I’ll today break things down by wireless technologies (that aren’t phones), phones, and imaging (including some displays). I’ll leave off with a present.
Wireless Technologies
This is from the booth of the “Visible Light Communication Consortium,” primarily driven by Keio University’s Department of Science Engineering’s Professor Nakagawa. The results of this development are simple to explain; users can know how many seconds it will be before a traffic light turns green or red. But the process isn’t nearly as simple to explain. In Japan, all traffic lights use LED lights to illuminate. The system, which is yet to have a bizarre Japanese name, uses the actual light emitting from LEDs to communicate data. Think of this as a fiber optic connection, without the cable. Albeit much slower: the demonstration unit at CEATEC ran up to a mere 9600 bits per second from a range of 10 meters. Still, how much bandwidth do you really need to just send signals to cars that say, “my light is changing color?” Regardless, the specifications of the final product include a range of about 50 meters, with a transmission speed “in the megabits per second.” One quite obvious potential disadvantage of this system is with visibility – if you can’t see the traffic signal, you won’t be able to get the data stream.
Speaking of wireless transmission systems, here’s a picture from NEC Electronics’ booth, where they are displaying a “video transmission system using wireless LAN.” The system can operate on IEE 802.11a, b, and g standards, meaning this new technology should be pretty easily adaptable to your current wireless setup. Consisting of both trasmitter and receiver, the transmitter will take whatever video signal it is and encode it into MPEG-2—I suspect due to bandwidth limitations—and the receiver will in turn decode your video for you. No mention as to whether or not this system supports HDTV signals yet, but as MPEG-2 is *technically* capable of doing HDTV, there is a gleam of hope.
No, I’m still not done talking about wireless technologies. I saved the best one for last: Wireless USB. Again from NEC Electronics, Wireless USB promises to be everything USB is, sans the wires. I think they key point here is that beyond the “Wireless USB PCI Host” installed in the PC, making your existing USB devices wireless is as simple as purchasing a “Wireless USB Device Adapter.” The specification doesn’t include any way to wirelessly deliver power, however, so I get the feeling that bus-powered USB devices will be up shit creek without a wireless adapter. [Unless you want a flesh-searing microwave beam, you’re right – ed.] The “Wireless USB Device Adapter” for your hard drives and such also supports USB Mass Storage, meaning you don’t need any silly drivers. So, this is a 480mbps wireless USB connection, requiring the purchase of only a PCI card and adapters for existing products? Yes please.
Cell Phones
Here’s Sanyo’s dual-mode (UMTS/GSM) sliding phone without a name. It has a 2.4 inch QVGA (320 x 240) dot screen, along with a 1.3MP camera. It also supports TV phone and “3D games.” Better yet, Sanyo is marketing this phone “for overseas providers.” When I saw the “GSM” and “overseas” in the same sentence, I immediately thought T-Mobile for the American market. But just looking over the T-Mobile phone page here real quick, it looks like T-Mobile doesn’t carry any Sanyo handsets. Oh well.
Chinese users will be happy to see NEC’s “N900” well on track. The two pictures above show the phone in a light I really haven’t seen it before. NEC’s plans for this one are certainly China-only, though—even Japanese users won’t be getting their hands on it.
What immediately struck me as “Nokia” turned out to be Fujitsu. Cell phones with keyboards (or smartphones in general) haven’t taken on nearly as well in Japan as they have in the states, but you wouldn’t so given Fujitsu’s new lineup of three concept phones. Apart from these three with keyboards, Fujitsu also displayed phones with screens that fold every which way, and even some with rubber to hang around your neck.
QR Codes, a technology to embed URLs and such into I guess what you could call “scatterplots,” have really been taking off in Japan. These are also called “two dimensional barcodes,” should you like to think of it like that. But since I think most American readers are familiar with those scatterplots on UPS packages, that’s what I’m going to call them. Reading data from a QR code is easy as pie: simply take a picture of it with your cell phone’s camera. Sensors will read the data from the barcode, and bammo, take you to a URL, add a new contact, or send a “secret message.”
At it again with the innovation, however, is NTT DoCoMo with technology embed QR codes into images themselves, allegedly through stenography. The concept is the same – take a picture with your camera, and it interprets data. But as you can see, the application is quite different, in that your eye sees a photograph, but your camera can read data from it. Brings a whole new meaning to “JPEG Virus,” doesn’t it? The system really works by converting the image to a 16-bit number string, which is then sent to a DoCoMo server, which will in turn return certain data.
Displays and Cameras
You’ve got a digital camera, and it can obviously take still images at HDTV resolution (up to 1,920 x 1,080). Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just take 30 pictures per second with your camera, and end up with an HDTV movie?
Nucore Technologies’ only business is image processors for digital cameras. They must be damn good at making them too. The company’s “CleanCapture” series will process images while they are still in the analog state – before being converted to digital – meaning that you can create “clear images with low noise on all counts.” More importantly, however, the processors have the power to consecutively record images with HDTV class resolution with a video’s framerate, realtime. In other words, your digital camera could theoretically use that high-megapixel CCD it has to instead create an HDTV movie.
That being said, there are still quite a few hardware limitations to the system. Namely, storage capacity of media. Even with today’s somewhat large flash media capacity, you wouldn’t be able to fit quite so many HDTV resolution images.
Want to see a 3D display from Sharp? Because you just did. Needless to say, the effect is lost on your computer screen. QVGA resolution (240 x 320) in 2.4 inches of pure sex [Sex with a JPEG, you mean. -ed.].
Wrapping up with cellular phones, here’s a prototype “display + fingerprint sensor” from Casio. Its function is clearly to serve as both fingerprint sensor and display at the same time, so I really needn’t go into it too much more. Sadly, the demonstration consisted of not much more than a display that would just play a movie of a fingerprint when you touched it, so don’t expect to see this anytime soon.
As a parting gift, I leave you with JVC’s codename “J4” two legged robot. Only 200mm high, the 770 gram robot features 26 degrees of freedom. He/she is also controlled by Bluetooth, so let’s hope there aren’t many hackers around while you’re playing “hide the knife” together.
For a bizarre twist, JVC is throwing some sort of “AV system control” line out. “The J4 provides users with a way to easily see the status of audio/video systems.”
Read – CEATEC JAPAN 2004 Link List [Impress Watch]
