CES 2011 – a look at the future – 3D, wireless and tablets

Miscellaneous notes

MSI had a impressive display at CES that featured their current and future products. They stressed the reliability of their current notebooks and also demoed their 3D and gaming notebooks.

We also see insanely high-performance PCs.

All of the major PC hardware vendors are represented.

Memory, harddrives, storage and PSUs

Memory and storage was featured along with power supply units.

Making the drives portable and smaller and smaller appears to be the manufacturers’ goal.

PSUs and Mini-cases

Does anyone really need 2,000 watts? Oh yes!

For the less extreme system, ‘only’ 1200W

Of course, going green is also important, especially for the power supply of a PC.

And there are many minis for many purposes.

Small and attractive cases were eye-catching.

We have just touched on a small corner of CES, but we do see that “green” is in as well as powerful but efficient systems.

Handheld and Wireless

Mobile-phone companies introduced a huge array of new devices and technologies at CES 2011. Last year was created a new “superphone” buzzword that may describe this industry’s new direction.  And the buzzword this year was 4G.

There is also a race on to gain momentum in the emerging e-reader device market space in a very crowded field. Brand-new and established companies are developing devices and accessories to meet what they hope will be a strong demand by consumers.  It seems perhaps they may have overestimated demand as over eighty companies have entered the tablet market.

Wireless connectivity

Of course wireless connectivity is big. Some companies were demonstrating full HDTV over wireless – up to 30 feet away from the transmitter with a totally clear picture and almost no interference. Some of these devices had the ability to transmit a signal through some walls.

Software

The software companies were well represented and there is a huge emphasis on applications or “apps”.  The traditional software companies were also there including Cyberlink and ABT was privileged to take a look at their cool new products that make video editing faster and easier.

Cyberlink

Cyberlink’s flagship products, PowerDVD, PowerDirector, MediaEspresso and YouCam are now optimized for 2nd generation Intel Sandy Bridge processors.  This provides users with enhanced and accelerated performance, enabling break through super-fast media processing with Intel Quick Sync Video, hardware accelerated Blu-ray 3D MVC video decoding, video editing effects rendering acceleration, Blu-ray disc authoring, HDMI 1.4 stereoscopic 3D output and HD webcam usage.

Cyberlink showed off its cutting-edge auto-stereo 3D solutions that enabling viewing glasses-free stereo 3D Blu-ray playback on laptops and desktop PCs with PowerDVD.

Here we got to see the Cyberlink YouCam in action.  Using their 64-bit software and taking full advantage of Sandy Bridge HyperThreading as well as older multi-core CPUs and optimizing for Nvidia’s CUDA, we can see smooth video in 1080p.  Not so smooth without the optimizations as you can see our demonstrator’s hand is blurred and CPU usage is way up.

Cyberlink recently released PowerDirector 9 which is also 64-bit software that is well-optimized to be much faster than its competitors at a very reasonable price.

Virtual Reality

This is the first year where VR – Virtual Reality – is more than a curiosity.  Wearing these new glasses you may be able to augment your reality.  If you are lost, someday you may call up your VR avatar to take you by the hand and guide you to your next destination.

Of course you cannot see the virtual world super-imposed over the “real” one without the glasses in this photo which was quite an impressive demonstration of future technology.