Archive for February, 2011

Nearly 50 3D movies are expected to hit US theaters this year, making the US the number one provider of 3D entertainment. Although many will be watching these 3D masterpieces at home in front of their TV lift cabinets, with their own pair of stylish 3D glasses, theater owners have long been looking for a way to offer their customers the same quality and comfort as an at-home viewing, without investing too heavily in thousands of disposable 3D glasses. The answer, now, is Xpand, a leader in active 3D technologies for home, cinema and education.

Xpand just released its award-winning, cinema-grade X101 3D glasses, and now cinema owners can provide top-quality reusable 3D glasses without breaking the bank. Each pair runs around $35 and can be used comfortably for up to 5,000 shows. The glasses’ viewing angles have been optimized, so patrons can sit wherever they wish in the theater and enjoy a clear 3D image. Hot spots, usually created by 2D movie presentations will no longer interrupt 3D move-watchers, thanks to the technology found in these glasses.

The Xpand X101 3D glasses are also optimized to work with all Texas Instruments DLP Cinema chips and they allow DC projectors to be at normal lamp setting – extending lamp life by as much as 80 percent. The included batteries will last for up to 300 hours and can be replaced by anyone with an Xpand battery key. The glasses also come with a 10-year warranty.

For security purposes, the Xpand X101 glasses come with a standard EAS anti-theft tag device. Xpand has built its reputation by providing 3D glasses and technology for some of the largest and most prestigious cinemas in the world, and their products have been used by millions of satisfied movie-goers in over 3,000 3D cinemas in more than 50 countries.

Xpand is also the only manufacturer of 3D glasses which work with all 3DTV brands, models, 3D computers, 3D gaming consoles and cinemas.

Couch Mouse M515

With today’s portability of electronics, people may be trading in their office chairs and desks for more comfortable surroundings more frequently. Perhaps in the traditional popularity of over-stuffed chairs and couches in coffeeshops, people who use their laptops at home are opting for the comforts of their own living room seating, at least enough are to warrant Logitech’s creation of the first Couch Mouse M515, which is completely optimized for soft surfaces, such as couches, beds or carpets. Now you can immediately go from watching your favorite movie on your flat-screen TV in front of your TV lift cabinet to pulling out your laptop and surfing the Internet without being bound to use the small, awkward finger pad present on most laptops. Logitech has made it possible to surf, shop and socialize with ease.

Now if you’re a real traditionalist and don’t like the idea of burning through batteries to have a wireless device, Logitech claims that the mouse will run for two years before needing a battery change. And to eliminate the need for smoothing out soft, bumpy surfaces, what makes the M515 mouse unique is the ability to spin through web pages with a finger-controlled roller-wheel on the top of the mouse.

The mouse works through a USB port on Windows-based PCs and Mac® computers. It comes complete with a 3-year limited hardware warranty, two AA batteries, a Logitech Unifying receiver and user documentation, all for around $50 USD.

The other nice part of this mouse is that it is only active when you are gripping it, so your cursor won’t move around on its own when you shift on your bed or couch. It also had a sealed bottom to prevent fuzz and fabric from getting inside through the sensor opening. Operating with a 2.4 GHz wireless speed, you won’t experience any lag time, delays or dropouts. Its hyper-fast scrolling allows you to burn through long blog posts, Twitter updates and Facebook feeds as fast as the eye can read. You can also switch the mouse to a click-to-click mode and scroll through photo albums and emails one at a time.

Check out the new Logitech Couch Mouse M515 and let us know what you think. And tell us, where do you most often use your laptop at home?

Seasons TV Lift Cabinet

Beautifully built from pine and pine veneers, the Seasons TV Lift Cabinet is a pleasure to use year-round. Featuring one of the largest of ImportAdvantage’s TV lift mechanisms, the Uplift 3700, the Seasons TV Lift Cabinet can house a flat-screen TV weighing up to 130 pounds and measuring up to 56” wide.

With three spacious cabinets that open to reveal vented adjustable shelves, the Seasons TV Lift Cabinet can do much more than just quietly raise and lower your flat-screen TV. It can protect it while also making your media players more accessible. Each of the cabinet doors comes with interchangeable wood and speaker cloth panels, so you can customize this furniture piece to your needs and preferences.

Arriving at your doorstep (with free In-Home Delivery) ready to hold your flat-screen TV, the integrated, pre-installed Infrared Relay System needs no programming and can relay any IR signal (remotes, wireless game controllers, etc.). All you need to do is plug in and play.

Take a moment to check out the Seasons TV Lift Cabinet and see for yourself its positive reviews from satisfied customers and a unique video about this TV lift cabinet.

The big buzz already this year in the world of game shows was not figuring out who was smarter than a middle-schooler, or which shiny briefcase held the most money, or even which contestant could look the silliest running, jumping and falling over an obstacle course. No, the real buzz was summed up in one word, “Watson”. And if you happened to catch an episode of Jeopardy! in front of your TV lift cabinet during February 14-16, you saw an IBM-built, artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions (in the form of a question) posed in natural human language.

Beyond what IBM’s Deep Blue did in 1997 to trounce world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, in a game with finite possibilities (as staggering as those possibilities were), Watson was able to process nuances in human language, calculate possible meanings, rank itself on how confident it was in his answer and buzz in – all in less than three seconds.

IBM and Jeopardy! producers joined together to pit Watson against the game show’s two most-winning, most well-known champions – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Jennings holds the record for longest championship streak, winning 74 straight games. Rutter is the all-time money champion, earning $3.25 million and never losing a single Jeopardy! match – until now.

Watson broke that streak and bested both of the former champions in a two-day match that aired over three days. The first day was a “practice round,” and then the two-day match was split between the Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy rounds. The final results were Watson in first (winning $1 million), Ken Jennings in second and Brad Rutter in last place (with both human competitors winning $300,000 and $200,000, respectively).

Over five years in the making, Watson is a machine constructed of 90 different servers, 2,880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. It can understand slang, plays on word, double-meanings and phrases previously thought to be only understood intuitively. Watson did stumble on some clues (having a harder time with short clues), and he made a few missteps in game play, such as guessing an answer that was already answered by an opponent and incorrect. It also thought Toronto was a U.S. city.

However, it dissected questions (actually, answers) into keywords and sentence fragments until it could formulate the most-correct response. Programmers “fed” Watson millions of documents to ready him, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference material that it could use to build its knowledge base. Watson was not connected to the Internet during the game, so it could only rely on what it already “knew”.

IBM has stated that Watson’s future could unleash a world of potential good, especially in the medical fields where doctors could consult with Watson to find cures, diagnose ailments and prescribe remedies. Until then, we may just be watching Watson on our flat-screen TVs in our pop-up TV cabinets making his way through the game show circuit.

In the sometimes ever-shrinking window of video game franchise success, Activision has pulled the plug, so to speak, on its hit video game series, Guitar Hero. Known for its colorful plastic guitar-controllers, South Park spoof episode and epic rock ballads, the Guitar Hero division, and its sequels, is no more.

Some may be delighted that no longer will they find their kid’s monstrous plastic guitar leaning against their fine hardwood TV lift cabinet, but those who helped usher in this era of classic rock simulation may have to start looking elsewhere for their Thrash-like fix. Video arcades will likely keep their coin-operated version of Guitar Hero a while longer, if nothing more for nostalgia. But for a game that was only created in 2005, and which spawned various sequels such as Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Guitar Heroes: Warriors of Rock and Rock Band, which meant buying a whole band set of drums and a microphone, the current sales could no longer support production. In the fourth quarter of 2010, Activision, which bought the Guitar Hero franchise in 2006 for $100 million, posted a $233 million net loss. The company then decided to let go the 500-person Guitar Hero division.

Some critics say the market was oversaturated, and consumers no longer wanted to buy a new controller (a limited one at that) good for only one game or one series of games.

On the flip side, the Guitar Hero games are not out of print yet, so if you are inspired to relive your garage-band glory days and don the fake-Gibson, there’s still time to pick up one or more games and controllers brand-new and unused.

Google has now launched a new service aimed to “simplify wedding planning” with Google Weddings. Pretty much an amalgamation of their pre-existing services, it seems that Google will be the place consolidate, organize, plan and share all the tedious tasks that goes into planning a spectacular wedding. But could this new service be lacking in one of the most important and anxiety-inducing areas? As of yet, there is no place to create an online Registry for guests to purchase wedding gifts. Where would you put down that you want the Ashford Manor TV Lift Cabinet? Perhaps it’s still up to Amazon.com to fill that void –with their versatile Universal Wishlist and Amazon Wedding Registry.

Still, without this key service, Google Weddings can be very helpful for building a unique wedding website or blog with a dedicated site through Google Sites. And the soon-to-be newlyweds can use Picnik to create invite cards and edit photos. Google Docs can be incorporated to organize and plan with multiple parties no matter where they reside – especially helpful for destination weddings and keeping your email Inbox free of a million attachments. Google Docs can handle more than just documents – spreadsheets, budgets and PDF files can be easily uploaded and shared. Google also thought of including its Picasa photo service to the mix, making it easy for people to share photos from the wedding with friends and family.

To boost the initial launch, Google has teamed up with wedding planner, Michelle Rago, for templates and tips for the happy couple to help with planning, and Google is hosting a wedding sweepstakes, offering a $25,000 prize and the chance to have Rago’s help planning your wedding.

The new Google Wedding site is Google’s latest attempt to more fully incorporate itself into its customers’ lifestyles. With other Google sites, such as Google Health, where users can organize, track and monitor their health information, weight changes and prescriptions (via CVS), the perennial question that arises with these launches is just how safe is your information with Google and what sensitive personal information is at risk in Google’s hands? So far there haven’t been any major breaches of security, so check out Google Weddings today and see if it will work for a wedding in your future.

You may have gone to the movie theater in the last two years to watch Avatar in 3-D, or perhaps you waited until it came out in Blu-ray to watch it at home in front of your TV lift cabinet. Regardless, you likely think that 3-D technologies are cool and will clearly be part of the entertainment industry’s future. But have you ever wondered how 3-D works? We uncovered some of the secrets of 3-D technology and we would like to share them.

Have you ever held up a pencil or finger and looked at it with one eye closed, then the other one closed? You’ll see that the image is the same, but it has a different perspective. This is “stereoscopy,” and it’s how the eyes and brain work together to create an impression of a third dimension. Our eyes are roughly 50 mm to 75 mm apart, and each eye takes in a different perspective, triggering the brain to do some crazy geometry to make up for the disparity between both images. It is this disparity that creates “3-D”.

So when we use technology to replicate this disparity (or 3-D), we use funny-looking (or stylish) 3-D glasses and silver-coated projectors to feed each eye a different perspective of the same image on the screen. That made everything sound simple, didn’t it?

Now we need to address the technology that goes into filming and showing a 3-D image onscreen. We know how the eyes and brain work together to receive and decipher images, but what are images onscreen except light and color. The first 3-D glasses we used to wear were those red and blue ones – having a different color lens for each eye. This helped separate layers of images by having some in red and some in blue, thus giving us a layered 3-D effect, but they couldn’t compensate for rich colors and often they “ghosted” images.

Today we rely on polarized glasses, which can give light different orientations. For instance, these glasses could project light with a horizontal polarization for one eye and a vertical polarization for the other. However, to view a 3-D movie with this technique, you’d have to keep your head completely still (ever see A Clockwork Orange?). To address this issue, 3-D glasses are now made to use rotational polarity, so a film can give two different spins – the glasses then pick up those distinct spins and lets one eye pick up the clockwise spin while the other interprets a counter-clockwise spin. Now you can tilt your head, rest it on your partner’s shoulder, or lean back to enjoy the 3-D film.

Additional 3-D effects come into play and are tweaked via specialized cameras and computer graphics, but “seeing” in 3-D all comes down to playing against the disparity between your eyes and your brain. Without getting it just right, there is no effect and there is no recording-earning film like Avatar.

Share with us your favorite 3-D film to date. Why did you like it – was it for the effect, the story or both?

Restoration TV Lift Cabinet

An exquisite example of traditional styling meets modernized functionality, the Restoration TV Lift Cabinet is a multi-step stained and scratch-resistant hardwood TV lift cabinet that is sure to impress, delight and get heavy use.

The Restoration TV Lift Cabinet comes complete with a pre-installed TV lift mechanism capable of quietly raising and lowering a flat-screen TV weighing up to an impressive 130 pounds and measuring 54” wide. The cabinet itself is hand-built from American Maple, and it can be placed against any wall in your home, including a home office or bedroom. The base molding conceals non-marking feet so you can easily move the cabinet for cleaning or rearranging.

The two center cabinet doors come with interchangeable cloth speaker panels for speaker storage, and the built-in shelf ventilation will keep your media players cool even when being used at peak levels. The included radio frequency remote control for the TV lift comes ready to work, with no programming required.

For ample storage, the Restoration TV Lift Cabinet is also designed with seven media storage drawers, each placed on a premium heavy-duty ball bearing drawer glide, giving you years of quiet and reliable use.

Take a moment to check out the Restoration TV Lift Cabinet and let us know what you think!

Founded on an idea Reiko Fukushima had nine years ago, coming back to work after maternity leave, Toshiba is now leading the charge on supplying the world’s first “naked-eye” 3-D TV. Recently covered in an interview with Fukushima in The New York Times, the progress of these developing technologies has done two things in Japan – sparked new heights for high-tech women researchers in that country and given confidence to all who were skeptical that a “naked-eye” technology could ever be developed.

Toshiba itself was skeptical when Fukushima first presented them the idea, but now last October at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the prototype of the 3-D TV was unveiled. It was always clear to Fukushima that 3-D glasses would have to go in order for the technology to truly take off, and her approach to the problem was to develop an algorithm that drew on a Toshiba imaging processor, named the “Cell,” to display nine different images for each frame. A sheet on the TV screen, called a “perpendicular Lenticular Sheet,” angles each image so the right eye can only see images intended for the right eye and the left eye can only see images for the left eye. The TV “screen” is actually an HD LCD display and completely unlike any 3-D TV display that has come before it.

The major hurdle for this new technology, however, is making the 3-D images work when viewed from wide angles. This issue is still being thought out, and the current models being released work best when viewed from within a 40-degree zone.  (Again, noting Walter Murch’s recent thoughts on 3-D technology)

There are only two Toshiba “glassless” 3-D TVs available now, a 12-inch screen for $1,200 and a 20-inch screen for $2,400. Toshiba claims that both TVs are for “personal usage.” The way the 40-degree viewing zone works out for these two models is a viewing distance of 35.4 inches for the 20-inch model and 25.6 inches for the 12-inch screen. Neither of these 3-D TVs would likely work well for a TV lift cabinet simply based on the small screen size and close viewing proximity, but with Fukushima and Toshiba clearly on the right path, perhaps it won’t be too long before affordable “glassless” 3-D TVs hit the shelves and you can bring one home to your pop-up TV cabinet.

Mitsubishi 3-D Starter Pack

Both Mitsubishi and Samsung have been producing 3-D-ready TVs for years. However, back when they first starting making and selling their 3-D TVs, the 3-D technology was much different than it is today. The result was that their TVs simply no longer worked with today’s technology, so the companies had to send out upgrade kits to be compatible.

Late last year, Mitsubishi released an upgrade kit for its DLP TVs, which is a technology no longer used by any TV manufacturer except Mitsubishi. These DLP TVs are adequate in quality, but they are often much thicker than today’s flat-screens. Their two-feet deep sets are no good for placement in TV lift cabinets. However, the company believes in the technology and will, in 2011, be releasing a 92-inch 3-D TV in DLP for under $6K.

But back to the upgrade kit, the 3D Starter Pack. The pack will work for both Mitsubishi and Samsung 3-D-ready DLP TVs (not including plasma models), and it comes with two pairs of active-shutter 3-D eyewear, a 3-D emitter, and updated 3-D adapter with remote, and HDMI cable and a Disney 3-D Blu-ray disc that includes trailers for several 3-D Disney films. You can find the 3D Starter Pack in most electronics stores or online at http://www.mitsubishi-tv.com/.