Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what are some of the coolest and most interesting new technologies that were displayed at the two thousand and eleven edition of c e S or the Consumer Electronics Show, which happened last week in Las Vegas. Here are ten things I saw that seemed particularly interesting. At number ten, Video has a smart TV with a keyboard on the remote.
Most TV manufacturers are making smart TVs that can connect to things like Twitter and Facebook, but how do you type in your messages? On many of these TVs, there's a separate keyboard that communicates with the TV via infrared or bluetooth. Video has a different answer. They've made the remote a slider that reveals a small keyboard like many cell phones. Do you type your tweet and then the
TV sends it instantly? And this remote uses a bluetooth connection technique, so you don't have to be pointing the remote at the TV as you're typing that. Number nine, there's a scale from with things that can tweet your weight. Keeping on the Twitter theme, let's say you're on a diet and you want the world to know how you're doing. You can now buy this scale from with Things. It will upload your weight via Wi Fi to Twitter every
time you weigh yourself. They also have a blood pressure device that connects to your iPhone so that you can keep all your data stored on your iPhone and uploaded if you want. At number eight, Alien War showed a three D laptop called the M seventeen X that's got a three D display as the laptops display, so you can get that full three D effect in a laptop format.
Now you don't have to be at home with a desk top machine attached to your three D h D t V. It's all compacted into a laptop form factor. In Alien Wars Incarnation, you get all the power of a desktop machine, lots of RAM, a powerful CPU, and a graphics accelerator all crammed into a laptop case, and then the three D display to boot. You can use glasses to see what's on that three D display in
three dimensions. Another really interesting laptop is Acer's Iconia. It actually has two screens, so it's a clamshell laptop, but instead of a keyboard, there's another screen where the keyboard would be The screens are the same size, and this gives you a very large screen size. If you open the thing up as a flat panel, you can also use the second screen to double as a normal keyboard and track pad. It just pops it up on that lower screen and then in that case it looks a
lot like a normal laptop or netbook. At number seven, so was showing another way to display three D content. It's a futuristic head mounted display. People have been showing active virtual reality glasses at c E s for ten years, and here the idea is that each eye has its own mini l c D or o l E D display that lets you see a three D world. In these systems, there's often a head tracking component as well, so you can look around in a three D game
very naturally, just by moving your head. Sony didn't take it that far. They're using the approach instead to simply display movies in three D. One of the things that gave this device it's buzz is the case design, which looks very cool, but it's not clear when the device is going to come out. At the other end of the three D spectrum, Sony showed two different cameras that can produce three D video. These cameras use two lenses so they can pick up images for both eyes simultaneously
and record them. You can watch the three D videos on the devices themselves, or you can plug the devices into your three D TV to watch them there. At number four is the Motorola Zoom Tablets spelled x O M. The Zoom got a lot of buzz because it's a very nice package that looks like it could compete with the iPad if the price is right. It has a
nice screen, two cameras, and so on. The other thing that gave this an aura is the fact that it showcased the Honeycomb version of Android for the first time, which has been tuned to work on tablets. At number three is the Razor Switchblade spelled r A z R. It brings PC gaming to a mobile platform. You can think of it as kind of a Nintendo DS on steroids that can play PC games instead of DS games. To work, it has to bring a mouse and keyboard
interface onto this smallest portable device. The keyboard has l c D s on each key so the smallest keyboard can adapt to any game and still give a good experience. So you can play World of Warcraft or Quake, or a wide variety of PC games anywhere you go with the Razor device. At number two is the Avatar Connect. There are now many three D worlds that you can live inside of. Second Life is the best known, but
World of Warcraft could be considered another one. The problem is that to control your avatar's actions you have to use key strokes, and that seems kind of a natural. The Avatar Connect uses the connect camera system to recognize what your real body is doing and then map those actions onto your avatar's body. So when you talk, your lips move on your face, the connects sees that and translates it into your avatar, so the avatar's lips move at the same time. When you wave your arm, your
avatar's arm follows suit. This is one of those things where you have to kind of see it in action to judge whether you think it's gonna work or not. Either way, it's definitely a different way to approach the problem of avatars inexpensively. And at number one there's Motorola's new Atrix smartphone with an extremely fast processor. So what if you make a smartphone so powerful that it's nearly
as powerful as a laptop computer. It has this fast dual core process or plenty of RAM, a graphics accelerator, and a flash hard drive. What it lacks to be a laptop or a netbook is as screen that's a decent size and a full size keyboard. The Motorola Atrix recognizes this problem and offers a clamshell keyboard and display for the Atrix. So you take the phone and you plug it into the back of this clamshell, and the Atrix phone provides the gut to the laptop. It drives
to the display and responds to the keyboard. On the clamshell display, you can pull up a full size Firefox browser and the phone lets you connect into the Internet and use it just like you would any browser. The clamshell has its own battery, and it can also charge the phone's battery at the same time. Obviously, this just scratches the surface of what was displayed at c e S in two thousand eleven. C E S is an immense show, covering more than a million square feet of
show floor space. It takes days to just walk through and see all this stuff. If you want to see more, you can come to blogs dot how stuff works dot com where I assembled a group of forty different videos of forty different products so that you can kind of have a virtual ce S experience for more illness and thousands of other topics. Does that how stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the house stuff works dot com home page.
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