24 hours has been enough time for me to orient myself to the labyrinth of exhibitions. I have spent most of the day in the Central Hall examining some of the latest technology for 2009 and (no surprise here) some of it is really, really cool!

I was most impressed by the various 3D display solutions. While most required the use of some kind of prop (for example special polarized glasses), one that I saw did not. LG demo'd a 640x480 3D TV sans the needs for anything other than to be about 4m away from the demo unit and voila! instant 3D. Closer inspection revealed the use of some kind of lenticular lens to achieve the effect. For those of you who are not familiar with such a lens, it isn't really anything special (surprise). You've seen them already, probably on a "special collector's edition" baseball card where depending on how you angle the card it "plays" an short series of 3-7 images. I didn't find the technology to work perfectly for me, but it worked close enough.

As for those display technologies requiring the special glasses (which I've experienced before) the sense of depth was even more pronounced than the LG TV. I was able to put the glasses comfortably on over my prescription glasses and after 2-3 seconds my eyes were able to adjust. One of the things I noticed about the displays requiring the glasses was the fact that I had to work my eyes like in real life. The image is, of course, no longer flat, so if you treat it like a TV image the 3D doesn't work as well as it could. Instead, I really had to look at the part of the image I was interested in, including refocusing my eyes to perceive something at a different depth. On one hand, the technology is really cool because of the effect of depth it enables. I watched an animated film with bright, saturated colors and was impressed. I watched another clip of a U2 concert (btw, this was all in 1080p High-def) and I felt like I was really seeing the act up close--an effect that would be very hard to beat unless you paid for front row tickets!

Both Intel and Microsoft had front and center booths at the entrance to the Central Hall. Intel was demoing a variety of form factors based on its different CPUs, Atom, Centrino Duo, Core 2 Quad, and i7. The Atom processor corresponded to lightweight, internet enabled devices. They call them Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). Centrino corresponded to WiMAX enabled internet connectivity. For example, in your car, which communicates to the cloud, and to all other such equiped vehicles. Interestingly, there were some advertising and safety angles to all that interconnectedness, including the ability to let you know of great restaurant deals at the next exit, or if you were getting too close to the car in front of you.

At the Intel booth I did have a minor opportunity to help a customer (the firm that Intel contracted to assemble their exhibition) diagnose what they thought may be a driver issue. Basically, on one of the their setups they use a capacitance-based touch screen to achieve a "Minority Report" style interface and every once-in-a-while the input from the interface would randomly get dropped. Specifically, they were routing the input data through a serial-to-USB dongle because they were out of serial ports with everything else happening. I suggested that the input driver could be functioning just fine, but that the rest of the stack was having communications issues because of the USB-bridge, or that they could try routing the serial information through COM1 (instead of COM8!), or that they could try to find a reference OHCI (or EHCI) USB stack to replace the Microsoft one, or that they could try purchasing a PCI card that provided additional ports instead of the USB dongle method. Finally, we discussed the possibility that static electricity could be causing the issues at which point I suggested they put a grounding pad under the display/interface or private test with a wool pad to cause extreme static interference and discharge. I don't know if any of that helped, but at least I was able to provide them with a couple of angles to track down a "driver-related" problem.

Microsoft had a lot of things to check out, but what interested me the most were the latest Windows Mobile phones. Two stood out, both by High Tech Computing (HTC). The first provided the ability to output a video signal to any display device that accepted composite video input (the yellow RCA-style connector for the curious), which effectively means your cell phone could now be a portable video warehouse, or a PowerPoint player in a pinch. The other cell phone provided an 800x480 touch screen--which is off the charts of everything else I'm aware of. It's still on a 3" diagonal screen, but the fidelity of the resolution is incredible. You could pretty much watch crisp/clear DVDs on that thing. Too bad it does not provide the ability to output to TV.

Speaking of cell phones and display interfacing, LG also demonstrated a pico-sized DLP projector unit that was smaller than most cell phones. Sometime around 2010 they expect to have a consumer model. It was neat to have such a small pocket projector.

Of course, there were huge Plasma and LCD displays. Panasonic demo'd a 150" Plasma display that appeared to be about the size of a typical car parking spot. Sharp demo'd a 108" LCD display that was crisp and beautiful too.

I got to see a 15" OLED display, which was crisp, bright, and incredibly thin!

As I meandered through the booths, a common theme was environmental friendliness; from being carbon and water neutral, to lead, mercury, and arsenic free, to increased efficiency for reduced power consumption.

I have made a list of about a dozen additional things I've heard of, but still need to see in person. I'm glad there are two more days to go.

— Kevin Shirley, [MSFT], WDK Programming Writer, January 9, 2009