Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi, I'm Marshall Brain with today's question, what
Speaker 1: are some of the coolest and most interesting new technologies
Speaker 1: that were displayed at the two thousand and eleven edition
Speaker 1: of c e S or the Consumer Electronics Show, which
Speaker 1: happened last week in Las Vegas. Here are ten things
Speaker 1: I saw that seemed particularly interesting. At number ten, Video
Speaker 1: has a smart TV with a keyboard on the remote.
Speaker 1: Most TV manufacturers are making smart TVs that can connect
Speaker 1: to things like Twitter and Facebook, but how do you
Speaker 1: type in your messages? On many of these TVs, there's
Speaker 1: a separate keyboard that communicates with the TV via infrared
Speaker 1: or bluetooth. Video has a different answer. They've made the
Speaker 1: remote a slider that reveals a small keyboard like many
Speaker 1: cell phones. Do you type your tweet and then the
Speaker 1: TV sends it instantly? And this remote uses a bluetooth
Speaker 1: connection technique, so you don't have to be pointing the
Speaker 1: remote at the TV as you're typing that. Number nine,
Speaker 1: there's a scale from with things that can tweet your weight.
Speaker 1: Keeping on the Twitter theme, let's say you're on a
Speaker 1: diet and you want the world to know how you're doing.
Speaker 1: You can now buy this scale from with Things. It
Speaker 1: will upload your weight via Wi Fi to Twitter every
Speaker 1: time you weigh yourself. They also have a blood pressure
Speaker 1: device that connects to your iPhone so that you can
Speaker 1: keep all your data stored on your iPhone and uploaded
Speaker 1: if you want. At number eight, Alien War showed a
Speaker 1: three D laptop called the M seventeen X that's got
Speaker 1: a three D display as the laptops display, so you
Speaker 1: can get that full three D effect in a laptop format.
Speaker 1: Now you don't have to be at home with a
Speaker 1: desk top machine attached to your three D h D
Speaker 1: t V. It's all compacted into a laptop form factor.
Speaker 1: In Alien Wars Incarnation, you get all the power of
Speaker 1: a desktop machine, lots of RAM, a powerful CPU, and
Speaker 1: a graphics accelerator all crammed into a laptop case, and
Speaker 1: then the three D display to boot. You can use
Speaker 1: glasses to see what's on that three D display in
Speaker 1: three dimensions. Another really interesting laptop is Acer's Iconia. It
Speaker 1: actually has two screens, so it's a clamshell laptop, but
Speaker 1: instead of a keyboard, there's another screen where the keyboard
Speaker 1: would be The screens are the same size, and this
Speaker 1: gives you a very large screen size. If you open
Speaker 1: the thing up as a flat panel, you can also
Speaker 1: use the second screen to double as a normal keyboard
Speaker 1: and track pad. It just pops it up on that
Speaker 1: lower screen and then in that case it looks a
Speaker 1: lot like a normal laptop or netbook. At number seven,
Speaker 1: so was showing another way to display three D content.
Speaker 1: It's a futuristic head mounted display. People have been showing
Speaker 1: active virtual reality glasses at c E s for ten years,
Speaker 1: and here the idea is that each eye has its
Speaker 1: own mini l c D or o l E D
Speaker 1: display that lets you see a three D world. In
Speaker 1: these systems, there's often a head tracking component as well,
Speaker 1: so you can look around in a three D game
Speaker 1: very naturally, just by moving your head. Sony didn't take
Speaker 1: it that far. They're using the approach instead to simply
Speaker 1: display movies in three D. One of the things that
Speaker 1: gave this device it's buzz is the case design, which
Speaker 1: looks very cool, but it's not clear when the device
Speaker 1: is going to come out. At the other end of
Speaker 1: the three D spectrum, Sony showed two different cameras that
Speaker 1: can produce three D video. These cameras use two lenses
Speaker 1: so they can pick up images for both eyes simultaneously
Speaker 1: and record them. You can watch the three D videos
Speaker 1: on the devices themselves, or you can plug the devices
Speaker 1: into your three D TV to watch them there. At
Speaker 1: number four is the Motorola Zoom Tablets spelled x O M.
Speaker 1: The Zoom got a lot of buzz because it's a
Speaker 1: very nice package that looks like it could compete with
Speaker 1: the iPad if the price is right. It has a
Speaker 1: nice screen, two cameras, and so on. The other thing
Speaker 1: that gave this an aura is the fact that it
Speaker 1: showcased the Honeycomb version of Android for the first time,
Speaker 1: which has been tuned to work on tablets. At number
Speaker 1: three is the Razor Switchblade spelled r A z R.
Speaker 1: It brings PC gaming to a mobile platform. You can
Speaker 1: think of it as kind of a Nintendo DS on
Speaker 1: steroids that can play PC games instead of DS games.
Speaker 1: To work, it has to bring a mouse and keyboard
Speaker 1: interface onto this smallest portable device. The keyboard has l
Speaker 1: c D s on each key so the smallest keyboard
Speaker 1: can adapt to any game and still give a good experience.
Speaker 1: So you can play World of Warcraft or Quake, or
Speaker 1: a wide variety of PC games anywhere you go with
Speaker 1: the Razor device. At number two is the Avatar Connect.
Speaker 1: There are now many three D worlds that you can
Speaker 1: live inside of. Second Life is the best known, but
Speaker 1: World of Warcraft could be considered another one. The problem
Speaker 1: is that to control your avatar's actions you have to
Speaker 1: use key strokes, and that seems kind of a natural.
Speaker 1: The Avatar Connect uses the connect camera system to recognize
Speaker 1: what your real body is doing and then map those
Speaker 1: actions onto your avatar's body. So when you talk, your
Speaker 1: lips move on your face, the connects sees that and
Speaker 1: translates it into your avatar, so the avatar's lips move
Speaker 1: at the same time. When you wave your arm, your
Speaker 1: avatar's arm follows suit. This is one of those things
Speaker 1: where you have to kind of see it in action
Speaker 1: to judge whether you think it's gonna work or not.
Speaker 1: Either way, it's definitely a different way to approach the
Speaker 1: problem of avatars inexpensively. And at number one there's Motorola's
Speaker 1: new Atrix smartphone with an extremely fast processor. So what
Speaker 1: if you make a smartphone so powerful that it's nearly
Speaker 1: as powerful as a laptop computer. It has this fast
Speaker 1: dual core process or plenty of RAM, a graphics accelerator,
Speaker 1: and a flash hard drive. What it lacks to be
Speaker 1: a laptop or a netbook is as screen that's a
Speaker 1: decent size and a full size keyboard. The Motorola Atrix
Speaker 1: recognizes this problem and offers a clamshell keyboard and display
Speaker 1: for the Atrix. So you take the phone and you
Speaker 1: plug it into the back of this clamshell, and the
Speaker 1: Atrix phone provides the gut to the laptop. It drives
Speaker 1: to the display and responds to the keyboard. On the
Speaker 1: clamshell display, you can pull up a full size Firefox
Speaker 1: browser and the phone lets you connect into the Internet
Speaker 1: and use it just like you would any browser. The
Speaker 1: clamshell has its own battery, and it can also charge
Speaker 1: the phone's battery at the same time. Obviously, this just
Speaker 1: scratches the surface of what was displayed at c e
Speaker 1: S in two thousand eleven. C E S is an
Speaker 1: immense show, covering more than a million square feet of
Speaker 1: show floor space. It takes days to just walk through
Speaker 1: and see all this stuff. If you want to see more,
Speaker 1: you can come to blogs dot how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com where I assembled a group of forty different videos
Speaker 1: of forty different products so that you can kind of
Speaker 1: have a virtual ce S experience for more illness and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics. Does that how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff
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