CES Unveiled is the first of the CES press events, taking place two days before the show starts. Although it the crowds seemed slightly thinner this year, the queue stretched almost out of the Mandalay Bay convention centre!
Altia Systems was showing its latest Panacast 180º camera system which uses three separate imagers and lenses to create in real time a 1080 x 3840 image with H.264 compression (H.265 later). The system has a minimum focus distance of around a metre. It will sell for $995.
AV Concept has unusual wireless projectors (Image:Meko)
AV Concept was a new company to us and the firm is based in Paris. The product on display was a projector that is entirely wireless except for power and gets its signals via Miracast, Bluetooth or HDMI Wireless (Amimon). The projector, known as the All in One HC (AiO) is built around a 1920 x 1080 0.47″ DLP chip and produces 1,000 ANSI lumens of brightness from an LED lamp. It runs the Android operating system. The unit should be available at the end of Q1 and AV Concept told us that it is very keen to minimise the environment impact of its products. It told us that it has an innovative business model that helps with this, but is keeping it under wraps until the launch itself.
Royole was showing the “personal cinema” headset that we have been reporting on for the last year. This was the first time that a couple of our reporters had seen the unit and had a chance to try it (Royole Makes Bold Claims About Home Theatre Device). One of the attractions of the headset is that it includes a high dot density OLED that eliminates the pixellation often seen with lower dot density displays. We were impressed with the visual quality of the images, the immersiveness and quality of the audio and the overall comfort and fit of the unit. The only criticism we had was that the size of the displays is quite small. The unit is shipping now at $695 and the firm told us that 3D is coming “soon”.
China’s Seiki is moving to low-cost UltraHD in a large way, and this year will launch multiple products using the format, including notebooks. New 28″ and 32″ desktop monitors were being shown on the night, joining the 40″ model launched last year. They will be available in March.
Tobii always shows game-related eye tracking, and this year was no exception. The company has finally built its eye tracking hardware directly into a laptop from MSI, called the GT72, and was demonstrating it on hacked versions of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and Grand Theft Auto V. We also saw a prototype laptop using the IS4 platform (Tobii Presents First Integrated Eye Tracking). The IS4 enables a much smaller footprint for the eye tracking module. It performs all related processing itself, rather than increasing load on the CPU. The component also reduces power consumption, as it performs foveated rendering (SMI’s High-Speed Eye Tracking Enables ‘Realistic VR’).
We have covered Californian startup uSens before (Impression Pi Boasts Control Through Computer Vision), when the company launched a crowdfunding campaign for its Impression Pi headset. The Pi was being shown off at CES Unveiled, and garnering a lot of attention. Deliveries are expected to begin on the 5th June this year. uSens has achieved 60fps hand tracking, and head tracking with six degrees of freedom. Mark Morrison, business development director, told us that hand tracking exceeded 20 degrees of freedom.
VideoStitch is a French company that was showing an unusual product. It is a camera rig that records 360° video and sends it to a PC in real-time. Video is then sent to a VR headset. We wondered about applications and were told that the company is targeting education and entertainment – the idea of attending a concert virtually sounded pretty good!
The VUZE VR Camera 4Vuze also had a 360° video camera that uses eight 4K cameras to create the full image. The firm told us that it has a patented technology for stitching that performs “intelligent object stitching” to minimise the artefacts between the images from adjacent cameras. It will be available for less than $1,000 in August.
Westinghouse, with industry veteran Rey Roque, were at the event to promote the TVs. We asked about specifications and features, but Rey told us that “it’s about the price”. The company had a 55″ Curved UltraHD TV that will sell at $699 when it arrives in “the spring”. An 85″ version will cost $5,999.
