innovations
Samsung has created a spectacularly fast Graphics Memory Chip: a 128MB DDR-SDRAM. That’s a bigger memory than most PCs have in the form of conventional memory. The new chip runs at 500 megabits a second (mbps), and will allow gamers especially to experience far higher resolution and clarity of image. Samsung claim the chips allows 60 frames a second to be shown, making for clarity three times higher than that of a conventional TV, which runs at 24 frames a second. The Korean manufacturer hopes to haul in $700-million worth of sales next year.
Amorphic Robot Works (ARW) was formed in 1992 by a group of San Francisco artists, engineers and technicians to create robotic performances and installations. To date, the society has built 100 interactive and computer-controlled machines ranging from 30cm high to 10m long. A number can be viewed on its website (www.cronos.net/ ~bk/amorphic) in QuickTime VR and RealVideo formats.
Nuntii Latini (News in Latin) is a weekly review of world events in the language of the ancient Romans – not the Latin Americans, as Dan Quayle said – by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, at www.yle.fi/ fbc/latini/summary.html.
For a glimpse of how the consumer electronics world will look in 2001, the place to be last week was the CEATAC 2000 show in Chiba, Japan. Many top Japanese companies, including Sony, JVC and Hitachi, paraded their new products at the show. JVC announced the impending launch of the world’s first hybrid digital/analogue video recorder.
The model pairs a 20 gigabyte hard disk drive with an S-VHS recorder. Users can record programmes digitally on the hard drive then archive them on the S-VHS deck. The unit goes on sale in Japan next month for about R13E000. Sony’s key offering was the Airboard, billed as a personal IT television. The unit features a 26cm LCD TV complete with TV reception, wireless e-mail and Internet access.
It goes on sale in Japan later in the year for about R9E000.
Sony’s robot pet dog Aibo is about to befriend a new canine chum. Sony has confirmed that the new dog is designed to partner and interact with its predecessor. Aibo went on sale in Japan last June, with the first batch of 3E000 dogs selling out in 20 minutes. Sony has sold more than 45E000 dogs worldwide, and they even have their own soccer tournaments.
Microsoft and Cambridge University are giving away the software needed to build your own speech recognition system. The Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) is available on servers in the university’s engineering department at http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/
The software was originally developed by Steve Young and Phil Woodland at Cambridge, and Entropic bought it in 1998. Microsoft – which bought Entropic and of course will retain the copyright on the code – says the release “will enable the hundreds of sites worldwide that already use HTK to continue to build on its capabilities, and will increase access to HTK in schools, universities and research laboratories”.
In the early days of screen-based computing, there was some discussion about whether the screen format should be horizontal or vertical. Horizontal won, and it was somewhat hard for dissenters to turn heavy tube-based monitors on their sides. That is no longer a problem with flat LCD monitors, which often come with pivot mounts. LG Electronics’ 37cm Flatron FL577LH (R7 000) can easily be rotated from landscape to portrait. And users don’t need to worry about reconfiguring Microsoft Windows to display a vertical image. LG says the monitor comes with software that automatically rotates the image when the user rotates the screen.
The new Siemens SL45 cellphone features a built-in MP3 player. You can carry between 35 and 45 minutes of music on a 32-megabyte removeable card. Using your computer you can record CDs or MP3 files on to the card – along with Microsoft Outlook addresses and calendar entries (the phone has its own address book and diary that can synchronise with these entries – and a stopwatch, calculator and currency converter). It will also store Word, Excel and Powerpoint files and digital voice recordings so you can carry files on your phone rather than using discs or a PDA. The SL45 comes with a Wap browser, an infrared interface and built-in modem so that you can fax or send emails from your Psion 5 or other hand-held device.
An extraordinary variation on the cellphone is being developed by the Media Computing Lab of Japanese company NTT DoCoMo. Superficially, it resembles a watchphone, but is far more slender. It contains a microphone to speak into – and a remarkable device that converts the sound of the call centre market researchers yakking, into vibrations.
Those vibrations travel through the hand and the finger – which you have to jam into your ear to hear. Perhaps its most glorious feature is that the phone doesn’t have a ring at all – it can only vibrate to alert you into adopting strange postures. Hence its name – the “Whisper”.
To answer, you click your fingers. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to be available before 2005.