The widely-renowned Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has unveiled its new home, a $90 million six-story, 163,000 square foot glass building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki. The Media Lab will continue to be devoted to research projects at the convergence of technology, multimedia, and design.
Rupert Murdoch has officially confirmed for once and all that the Wall Street Journal will be coming to the iPad, and that they’ve already been “allowed to work on one”, for the purpose of fine-tuning it before launch.
TiVo has officially announced its Series4, the TiVo Premiere and Premiere XL, which sports an all-new sleeker hardware design, and, hear this, a completely revamped high-def interface based on the Flash platform. TiVo’s pitch? “This is a one-box solution to combine all your content; cable programming, movies, web videos, and music “.
The O!Play HD2 isn’t the only media-centric device that ASUS have quietly snuck into their CeBIT 2010 line-up; there’s another, somewhat more interesting set-top box on show too. The ASUS EeeMedia EM0501 is supposedly a “High Definition Media Center”, based around an 800MHz Samsung S5PV210 ARM chipset with 512MB of RAM and a 2.5-inch HDD bay. It can hook up to your network for streaming content, and output 1080p Full HD.
Wired has definitely been busy working on something top-secret for the last several months, and now we’ve discovered that they’ve still been working on the same-old magazine, with one tiny exception: it’s for the iPad. The new digital product, the Wired Reader, has been recreated for a touchscreen tablet experience. Here’s the demo of the Wired experience, the iPad way, after the break.
Whereas iPhone owners may have gotten a so-so update, Nexus One owners finally have something to be upbeat about – Google has released an over-the-air update enabling multitouch (finally), Google Goggles (again, finally), and some 3G fixes (triple thumbs-up).
We’ve seen virtual keyboards before, but the technology has never quite taken off. But this is quite exceptional. UK-based Light Blue Optics (LBO) has unveiled a revolutionary compact projector that lets users interact with images projected onto a flat surface, essentially turning it into a touch screen. Remarkably, it has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, which allows users to access and connect with internet-based applications and engage in social networking and multimedia sharing via the projector itself, which runs Adobe Flash Lite 3.1.
Slightly less eye-catching than a touchscreen remote and a portable HDTV with integrated WiFi, Sling Media’s two remaining products could be no less useful if your cable or satellite provider does the decent thing and decides to offer them. The Sling Receiver 300 is a slip of a box designed to hook up wirelessly to EchoStar’s SlingLoaded 922 HD DVR and funnel 1080i content to a distant HDTV, similar in principle to the Sling Monitor 150 only without the integrated display. Meanwhile the Slingbox 700U hopes to add place-shifting functionality to existing internet-connected DVRs.
Broadcom have outed a number of new chips, including a new 1080p-capable multimedia processor and an IP platform intended to add 3D graphics and multimedia capabilities to DVRs and set-top boxes. The Broadcom BCM2763 VideoCore IV Processor is a 40nm chip that can process up to 20-megapixel images and 1-gigapixel 2D/3D graphics rendering, along with outputting Full HD 1080p via HDMI. Meanwhile the Broadcom Persona platform couples a BCM11211 comms processor and BCM11181 multimedia processor, and supports streaming content, complex GUIs and integration with the company’s various wireless and wired networking components.
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We can thank the CEDIA expo for all the new home theater projectors and other gear that have been announced this week. NEC has unveiled a pair of new projectors for users on a budget that want home theater capability along with multimedia functionality. The projectors include the NP110 and the NP215.
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