Tomorrow's TVs Today
Jan 12 2009
In television hardware, as in life, one can never be too gorgeous or too thin. At least that's the impression of strolling around the Consumer Electronics Show.
If everything that was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show last week comes together, in five years or so we'll be watching 3-D YouTube videos on paper-thin screens controlled by waving our hands in mid-air.
Unfortunately, no one yet is actually putting all those pieces together. But I could see how future TVs might turn out as I trekked around the show floor. Here's what I ran into:
Razor thin and razor sharp
Wii-like controls
3-D vision
Net TV
TVs everywhere
Oh, for what it's worth, no one I ran into at C.E.S. was the least bit excited about Blu-ray disks. The technology for delivering movies will most likely leap directly from DVDs to high-def downloads over Internet or cable systems. Blu-ray doesn't seem like part of the future—more like a soon-to-be historical footnote.
