Tom Merritt shows off Bug Labs' modular gadget on the CNET Stage.
In a year when several of our colleagues felt underwhelmed by the products on display at CES, the emerging technologies category provided some much-needed excitement for the year to come.
Our Best of CES winner, the Bug Labs platform, generated buzz among both CNET editors and readers with its mix of open-source hardware and software, plus an innovative pricing scheme that encourages early adoption. Though we have no doubt the product will at first appeal to tinkerers and hobbyists, we're intrigued by the prospect of a future filled with modular gadgetry.
Other technologies to catch our attention seemed to come straight out of The Jetsons: the Starry Night Sleep Technology Bed promised to cater to our every desire for leisure and entertainment; the Creative InPerson moved us one step closer to a portable videophone; and Pioneer's "Extreme Contrast Concept" showed us a future filled with currently unfathomable picture quality, thanks to its ability to produce absolute blacks.
This year's show also brought a number of consumer applications based on technologies originally developed for the government or military. The SpeechGear Compadre software suite provides instant translation of text, speech, and images. BigStage face-mapping technology has been introduced as a way to automatically create realistic avatars. And 3DV's ZCam uses next-generation 3D imaging to control video games and other interfaces through body movement and gestures.
For a glimpse of more products set to drive consumer electronics in 2008 and beyond, check out all our posts on emerging technologies.
View complete CES 2008 coverage from CNET.
PALO ALTO, Calif.--Despite the digitization of nearly everything else in our daily lives, the Sunday circular ad for beef and bags of baby carrots has remained. Hewlett-Packard is developing a technology to bring even the banal task of grocery shopping into the Digital Age.
At HP Labs here, researchers are developing an in-store kiosk solution called Retail Shopping Assistant (RSA) that will make shopping for food, clothes and electronics easier for buyers and make selling things easier for retailers.
HP Retail Store Assistant
(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)The idea is this: imagine walking into a grocery store, and instead of bringing your shopping list along, simply swiping a club card or entering a phone number. Any information you've entered online from home (milk, eggs, pretzels, ground beef, apples) will show up on your profile. There will also be special offers tailored to your shopping habits--your club card already keeps track of the fact that you prefer Diet Pepsi to Coke, and that you buy a carton of eggs every other week. The kiosk simply matches your info with retailer offers to generate the appropriate coupons.
The RSA kiosk will then create a printed list of special discounts and shopping items. On the back will be a map of the store and the location of all of the items, eliminating the need to comb every aisle of a store. And instead of fumbling for coupon clippings, a single barcode on the printout will track the customized offers and remove items from the shopping list that were purchased.
If a printed piece of paper is too cumbersome, HP says the list and information could also be transferred by Bluetooth technology to a mobile device, like a phone.
To read the full CNET News.com story on this innovation, click here.
If there were no buttons on your cell phone, imagine how big the screen could be.
Synaptics is doing just that with its Onyx phone, a new concept in cell phone technology. Shaped like a remote, it's a bar-style phone that would integrate GPS, music, teleconferencing and calendar events.
The Onyx concept phone
(Credit: Synaptics)But the coolest part is the screen, which takes up nearly the whole handset. Synaptics calls it ClearPad, a thin, high-resolution touch screen based on the company's proprietary sensing technology. With it, there would be no need for buttons to input information. Information can be entered into the Onyx concept phone with two fingers, or via text entry.
Unfortunately, no company is planning on releasing this phone anytime soon, but the Onyx is out there and could be an indicator of what's to come in the design of mobile handsets.
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