Spencer Hooks sends in his second report from the floor of CES:
Panasonic Virtual Keyboard
We have been hearing about virtual keyboard technology for some time now, but this is the first time I have seen it in person. Panasonic has a small part of their display showing the virtual keyboard and it is there to play with. My first experience using the keyboard was pretty bad, but after a little explanation by the Panasonic representative and a little practice on my part it did work okay. With more fine tuning by Panasonic I think it could work quite well. It will definitely take some getting used to though. They intend to first release it as a stand-alone product as shown in the pictures, then they will integrate it into products. Panasonic put this together through their subsidiary Pin Change in conjunction with VKB Inc. It’s good to see such a large company getting behind this technology.
Alpine F#1 Status
Alpine has chosen CES to launch their new top-of-the-line automotive product. It uses an in-dash DVD transport and a separate decoder unit to decode the audio. The two pieces are connected with IEEE1394 to transmit the audio bitstreams, including the very high bandwidth DVD-Audio bitstream. This product is the highest of high end in car audio and will likely cost a few thousand dollars, but it features almost all of the major audio technologies. It features Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic II, DTS-ES, Neo:6 and is the first automotive product to feature Dolby Digital EX.
Displays Dominate
One very obvious major theme this year at CES is flat-panel displays and the North Hall automotive section is just as much a part of this as the other halls. The big thing for cars is flip-down displays used for rear-seat DVD players. These displays are getting bigger and bigger with companies like Icon-TV and Clarion offering 15″ flip-downs. Kenwood (while not in the North Hall) has taken a different direction with their top-of-the-line flip-down display. They have focused on audio and are including Dolby Headphone technology and wireless headphones in their LZH-100W. This is the first product in the automotive space to feature Dolby Headphone – a technology that provides an immersive surround sound experience over headphones. Dolby Headphone uses a powerful DSP process to recreate the sound of 5 speakers in a listening room.
