The $25,000 pricetag attached to Sony’s 84-inch UltraHD set—the one that’s been haunting your dreams since CES—may put that super-sized set out of your financial reach but that doesn’t mean everything 4K is prohibitively expensive. In fact, Sony’s new 55- and 65-inch sets are downright inexpensive (by comparison) and will be available for pre-order by the end of the month. More »
The price of big screens is falling precipitously, and not just for the off-brands you pack into your cart next to gallon jugs of mayo. Sharp’s 6-series LED TVs, for example, offer gorgeous displays for less than the cost of a Pixel. More »
Today Samsung hosted an event at the American Museum of Finance. It announced pricing on some stuff they’d already announced and blah blah blah showed off smart TVs we saw two months ago at CES. But more importantly they had some special guests: Supermodel/professional breast-haver Kate Upton, brother of Peyton Manning Eli Manning, and Flo Rida (pronounced: /floʊ ˈraɪdə/), the only rapper named after a state. More »
3D is all the rage these days when it comes to the movies. The studios have opened up to the concept of shooting movies in three dimensions. It has been found to add to the viewing experience that people derive when watching the movie in a theatre. In fact, the most successful movie of all time was shot in 3D. Despite the cynics and critics lamenting how 3D is ruining the movie going experience, the technology is holding strong and may well continue to do so for the next many years to …
The hardest thing about watching TV is finding the remote after a long, slovenly lounge on the couch. Cube26 aims to improve on that situation by turning your TV, phone, or tablet into a face-detecting powerhouse. What does that mean? Basically, your TV or other device will know when you’re looking at it, who is in the room with you, and, more importantly, it will pause the program, call, or game when you leave the room.
Founded by Cornell grads Saurav Kumar and Aakash Jain, Cube26 is still in beta, but from what I saw it works quite well on multiple platforms. For example, in addition to the aforementioned “bathroom pause,” the system can tell when you’re talking on the phone and put other devices on hold. You can also use the system for parental control as it can recognize people in the room and plan content accordingly.
“Other players in vision control are generally focused on one specific area, for example concentrating on hand-gesture detection for TV control or face recognition or body control,” said Kumar. “We believe in making the interaction with devices as natural as possible. For example, when you want to mute the volume for a device, instead of using hand gestures to do some pre-defined pattern, how about you say ‘ssshhh!’ to make a ‘keep quiet’ gesture?”
The company is bootstrapping now and expects to have some traction in OEM hardware over the next few months. They haven’t named any hardware partners, but they were at CES to look for distributors for the technology.
The project aims to take a holistic approach to system interaction.
“For vision control to be natural we believe that the solution is to leverage a wide range of vision signals from the user – both implicit and explicit. Signals include presence detection, gesture, age and gender detection, face recognition and eye tracking, and hand gestures.”
In other words, the system works best with passive, instinctual commands. Unlike the Kinect and similar motion controllers, the system is always watching the room for changes, allowing for a more integrated experience.
The founders came together at a startup weekend organized by Microsoft. They got together for six months of development and focused from making eye-tracking systems for marketers onto “natural control” of devices.
Again, much of this tech is fairly pie-in-the-sky right now, but as the speed of embedded systems improves I don’t see why this couldn’t be embedded right into a TV or phone, thereby adding real smart features to otherwise dumb devices.
If you thought Sony’s 84-inch 4K TV was expensive at $25,000, then think again. Samsung has announced the pricing of its new flagship model—and you could buy a number of cars with the same cash. More »
2013 is shaping up to be a huge year for huge televisions. Almost every major brand is rolling out gigantic sets and packing them with four times the resolution of current TVs. One curved display is even redefining what constitutes a “flat screen” TV, period. Here’s what to watch in 2013. More »
Samsung’s S9, an ineffably beautiful television trapped in a massive, metal pillory, might be both the best and worst thing at CES 2013—it’s certainly the strangest. It’s amazing, terrifying, futuristic, barbaric, and almost gloats that you’ll never own it. This TV hates you. It wants you to hate it back. And that’s totally wonderful in its own unfortunate way. More »
Hisense is a Chinese company you may or may not have heard of. But they’ve jumped in on what seems to be the prevailing trend of CES with six UHD 3D TVs. More »
Vizio has a cute, self-deprecating display up at CES. It showed a Vizio TV made 10 years ago compared to one made in 2012. TVs were butt fugly back then—it’s as big a difference as a Palm Pilot and the iPhone 5. More »
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