One thing I never expected was that exhibits in the “emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies” instal­la­tion gallery would actu­ally be emerg­ing. I was pleas­antly sur­prised to see that two of the exhibits had been turned into actual prod­ucts on the exhi­bi­tion floor:

Last year Sun­ny­brook tech­nolo­gies showed off their HDR dis­play — an LCD screen with a low-resolution active back­light, result­ing in about a 1:200000 con­trast ratio. Truly amaz­ing to look at. This year, Sun­ny­brook had changed their name to “Bright­side” and was show­ing off an absolutely gor­geous 37″ HD+HDR flat panel dis­play at the expo. I didn’t ask, but I heard sec­ond­hand that it was going for $50000. Ouch. I’d love one of those in my liv­ing room, but unless they really take off, I doubt it’s going to hap­pen any time soon.

I don’t remem­ber the com­pany name (it was some Japan­ese research group), but there was another very cool dis­play tech­nol­ogy last year — a 6-color pri­mary pro­jec­tion sys­tem. I remem­ber think­ing that it looked almost like it was show­ing col­ors I’d never seen before — of course, I’d seen them in real life, but it was shock­ing to see bright magen­tas and yel­lows com­ing from a com­puter screen. Their exhibit on the show floor was a bit under­whelm­ing — they had shrunk it down into a mon­i­tor (which hap­pened to be about 6′ long), but the images they were show­ing didn’t really take advan­tage of it. Kind of a shame — the tra­di­tional RGB gamut is really lim­ited, and I think that once peo­ple real­ize what they’re miss­ing out on, they’ll start demand­ing it.

I can’t really think of any­thing I saw at this year’s emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies show that I’ll see at the expo next year. The dig­i­tal kalei­do­scope and hap­tic row­ing sim­u­la­tor were kind of cool, but cer­tainly noth­ing mind-blowing. Prob­a­bly the most likely “emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy” was a neat game they had. There was a floor with a child’s draw­ings taped down with RFID tags under them, and mov­able obelisks with LCD screens and speak­ers. The game itself was to solve a mur­der mys­tery — you saw short clips of the action, and moved the screens around to the draw­ings based on what you saw.

The game was sur­pris­ingly fun, espe­cially for how child­ish they made the story and the puz­zle. The cool part was that the posi­tion of the screens matched the way the shots were filmed — in one case, two screens were beside each other, while the other faced it from the other side of the floor. The lone screen showed a tele­vi­sion set, while the other two showed two peo­ple on a couch watch­ing it — very cool.

The game itself was easy (except for all the peo­ple who didn’t know what we were up to and kept mov­ing the screens around, mess­ing up the arrange­ment), but the pos­si­bil­i­ties seemed pretty cool — def­i­nitely a fun way to spend 15 min­utes, and I imag­ine it could be a very pop­u­lar activ­ity, espe­cially if the puz­zles were made harder.

More thoughts on this year com­ing when I think of them.

Tags: graphics, siggraph