Forget hi-def TV. That technology is as old as the internet. The next generation of digital entertainment could bring entertainers into your living room as full-sized 3D holograms, bring cell phone voicemails to life with tiny images of callers or bring you face-to-face with Super Mario himself.

It’s an exciting time for physicists and other researchers who have spent decades trying to expand the applications of holography, the creation and manipulation of 3D images made by bouncing laser light around.

Last month, a team of researchers at the University of Arizona unveiled a critical breakthrough toward the elusive goal of holographic video, developing a technology that allows holograms to be rewritable for the first time. This allows 3D images to be changed many times per second, just like the frames in a movie.

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Bill Gates was the keynote speaker on the last day of Microsoft Convergence 2006, held this year at the Dallas Convention Center.

Demonstrating what he believes will be popular future uses, Gates showed off a screen for the home that merged a TV and computer monitor. Touching the screen to view news segments from different channels, he found a story he was interested in and touched a button labeled “track topic.” Developments in the story throughout the day would then be sent to him at work or on a wireless device, he said.

At a work scene, Gates approached a desk surrounded on three sides by glass panels. Gates dazzled the crowd when the panels turned out to be one big computer monitor.

“Screens like this will be very common,” Gates said.

Microsoft’s moves to bring software to the Web are seen as an attempt to catch up with dot-com heavyweights such as Google and Yahoo.

“We’re taking the best elements of the online world,” Gates said.

One of the elements he cited was mashups — an increasingly popular way of merging two separate Web applications. The most popular mashups have involved Google’s mapping software, such as a site that combines it with online real estate listings to show users a map of where homes are for sale. Gates called mashups “grassroots programming.”

Gates also touted Vista, the next version of Microsoft’s operating system. Gates said users will be amazed by how well-designed Vista is. Microsoft, he said, has tested ideas with focus groups to find out what users want out of the next generation of Windows.

He cited speech-recognition software as a technology that would transform the world of electronics in the next 30 years.

“Everyone knows when that really really works, it’s going to be a huge deal,” he said.

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U.S consumers bought more Windows Media Center-equipped PCs than the standard edition of Windows XP last month and sales of Media Center will reach 10 million by the end of March, a Microsoft executive said Tuesday.

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows eHome Division, disclosed the sales numbers at a keynote speech here at Mix ‘06, a Microsoft conference aimed at Web developers and designers.

Belfiore also demonstrated the upcoming enhancements to Media Center, which will come out with Windows Vista at the end of this year, saying it will “blur the line between television and interactive video content.”

Sales of Media Center, a higher-end version of Windows XP for handling multimedia content, were sluggish in the first few years of its life, but have picked up as Microsoft has cut prices and dropped a requirement that PCs that run Media Center come with a built-in TV tuner.

Belfiore said that sales of Media Center are now running at 1 million units per month and that the company is “highly confident” total sales will top 10 million by the end of the month.

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The booming market for flat panel TVs is about to make way for yet another technology – one that threatens to challenge the lock that plasma and liquid crystal displays (LCD) currently have of this red hot consumer electronics product category.

The technology is called SED, which stands for surface-conduction electron-emitter display. And this week, Toshiba and Canon announced that the first SED flat panel TVs will go on sale in the fourth quarter of next year.

The Japanese partners have described the technology as a major industry milestone, “a once-in-50-years historical turning point for the TV industry, comparable to the initial introduction of CRT television”.

The panels have a reputation for delivering clear and vivid images because their light-beaming technology is similar to that for old-style cathode-ray tube TVs.

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LG.Philips LCD Wednesday took the wraps off a 100-inch thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panel, which the company claims is the largest in the world.

The model developed by the world’s runner-up LCD producer is about 1.5 times bigger than the previously largest 82-inch product of Samsung Electronics, the global top player.

“Our development of the 100-inch LCD panel reaffirms LG.Philips LCD is the global leader in large-area LCD technology,” the firm’s vice president Yeo Sang-deog said.

“Technological advances for large-area LCD TVs, such as the 100-inch LCD, will act as a catalyst that accelerates demands for high-quality and large screens,” he added.

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When it comes to watching television, it seems bigger is always better.

So why settle for a pipsqueak 50-inch plasma television or one of those modestly sized 65-inch rear-projection TVs when you can get something truly gigantic?

A growing number of consumers are taking a look at front-projection video systems, units that transmit an image onto a screen much like a slide projector. Front projectors can create images 110 inches and greater in size. Couple this with a surround-sound system and, unless you like commercials and chattering seatmates, you may never want to go to the movie theater again.

Front video projectors have long been used in offices to show PowerPoint presentations, and are found in the screening rooms of the rich and famous. But with prices now starting at less than $1,000, they are becoming affordable for more people.

The market for this home entertainment technology, though still modest, is growing fast. Just 18,000 front video projectors were sold for home use in 2001, but sales jumped to 306,000 in 2005, and are expected to grow to 452,000 this year, according to Quixel Research, a video research firm in Portland, Ore. That remains a tiny fraction of the 34 million televisions sold each year in the United States.

Front projectors range in price from $900 to $250,000. Major manufacturers include Epson, InFocus, Panasonic, Runco, Sharp, SIM2 and Sony.

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Bigger. Wider. Flatter. That’s the vision of tomorrow’s entertainment. And if you’ve already got a new high-definition flat-panel TV, you know exactly what we’re talking about.

But HD flat-panels aren’t just a bleeding-edge luxury anymore. They’re about to become the household standard. While today’s entertainment networks offer only a handful of high-def programs, the number of HD shows is rapidly growing. And if natural market forces weren’t moving rapidly enough for your liking, the United States Congress has just given the technology a firm push forward. There’s never been a better time to jump on the HD bandwagon.

Television as you’ve always known it is about to be history. Just weeks ago, President Bush signed into law a piece of legislation that will require all television broadcasts in the United States to use digital signals, rather than the old analog VHF/UHF signals we’ve received on our tubes for the last few decades — and make the change by Feb. 17, 2009.

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In the future, drivers will be able to conveniently retrieve information from the Internet using “natural language.” This has been made possible by a new technology that automatically generates voice applications from Internet information and transmits it to the vehicle via radio signals.

It’s just not your day. You drive by several low-priced gas stations and then, just when you’re on the point of running out of gas, you wind up at a pump where a liter costs five cents more. “Just my luck,” you say to yourself as you reach for the nozzle. But it could all be different in the future. Tomorrow’s drivers will ask their car radio for the locations of the cheapest gas stations along their route. What currently sounds like a fairy tale could one day become a reality. “SmartWeb Vehicle” is the new mobile information system that interacts with drivers in natural language.

While you drive, the system searches the Internet for any potentially useful information. If you want to know which gas station in Dortmund has the lowest gas prices or how many goals Schalke 04 has scored, you can use SmartWeb Vehicle to retrieve this information from the system by means of voice input. Although it sounds simple, it involves a number of sophisticated technologies that have to be combined into one operational whole. The new system is being developed by experts from the Siemens Corporate Technology Division (CT) in Munich and engineers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Device Architecture and Software Technology (FIRST) in Berlin. The vehicle prototype from the SmartWeb project will be on display for the first time at the CeBIT computer trade show March 9-15 in Hanover. The exhibit can be found in Hall 9 at the BMBF’s Human – Technology – Interaction booth A44. Sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the SmartWeb project involves fifteen partners from industry and research cooperating on a utilization of the semantic web under the direction of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

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Abstract
Personal Communication with mixed voice and data can be offered as a very rich set of applications, which can be rapidly introduced at low cost. Wireless and positioning technologies in combination with Internet’s demonstrated capability to integrate voice and data are further leveraged by the use of software agents. Our work clearly demonstrates the benefits of providing context-aware personal communication in terms of its potential to bringing about the rapid introduction, at low cost, of a rich communication space where artifacts, people, and non-physical entities are integral parts.

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The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form.

This document gives a road map – a sequence for the incremental introduction of technology to take us, step by step, from the Web of today to a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.

It follows the note on the architecture of the Web, which defines existing design decisions and principles for what has been accomplished to date.

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