Ars Comdex Report: Wednesday Edition
More PDA news from Hannibal, and scents over the 'net
Today, I continued my quest for PDAs, this time stopping by HP's booth to
check out their Jornada 720 and 680. There was just one problem with that plan,
though. Neither of those products were there. In fact, HP didn't have a single
Jornada with a keyboard at their entire pavilion. I have no idea why they chose
to leave these products out, and neither did any of the HP reps I talked to.
Disappointed and slightly annoyed, I left the HP booth and checked out some of
the other PDA offerings on the floor.
A company called Agenda was
showing the VR3, a PDA based on a handheld version of Linux called Linux VR. It
didn't take me more than a minute of looking at it to realize that, like its
desktop counterpart, Linux VR (at least in this implementation) is interfacially
challenged. Or, in non-P.C. speak, it looked like garbage. I left without
playing with the device, but Will Ryu tells me that it was performance
challenged too. Hmm... maybe some of the other VR devices coming out won't have
these problems.
After deciding that nothing I saw on the PDA scene this year looks that much
more attractive than my Palm V, and that I'm probably going to just break down
and buy a laptop to do Office stuff on, I headed out the perimeter of the floor
to investigate some of the smaller booths that often are showing cooler products
than the big flashy pavilions in the center of the floor. It wasn't long before
I was rewarded with the sight of the Digiscents booth. Digiscents is a company
that I've covered before here on Ars, because their mission is to smell-enable
the Internet. They have a little machine that sits in front of you on your desk
and generates scents from a prearranged palette of smells stored in the device.
They released an SDK a while back, which lets developers cook up new scents by
combining scents from the existing palette and scent-enable games and
applications.
A Digiscents rep was kind enough to sit down with me and demo the product for
me and answer questions, so I can tell you what I thought of it based on the
prototype they had there. Basically, it was kind of cool, but you can tell that
it has a long way to go before the full potential is reached.
The rep opened an email with a scented attachment, which was supposed to smell
like roses. When he clicked on the roses, I got a slight gust of ostensibly
rose-scented air in my face from the little box in front of me. It was
rose-scented in the same way that those things you hang in your car are, meaning
you can see where it sort of smells somewhat like a rose if you know that that's
what it's supposed to be, but the overall impression was of a pleasant
artificial air-freshener type scent.
Next, the rep opened up this tropical isle scene that was supposed to smell
tropical. Instead, for the first few seconds it smelled like the fake roses. I
could tell from talking to him that this is one of the bigger challenges that
Digiscents faces--getting the first smell to dissipate from the machine quickly
enough to where it doesn't pollute the next one is hard when the first smell was
kind of strong. After the roses faded I actually could smell coconut and a few
other unidentifiable odors, so it did wind up working eventually.
The main question that I had for the rep was this: what's to keep someone
from haX0ring up some sort of rank, rotting flesh smell and mailing it to
someone with a name like "spring showers" or something so that they
wind up stinking up their workstation? The rep tried to assure me that this was
somehow impossible because the machine didn't carry those categories of rank
odors like rotting flesh, flatulence, etc. Still, I remained unconvinced. Then
he started talking about Digiscents' designs on the gaming market, and I pointed
out to him that a developer like iD would definitely want the smell of rotting
flesh for their games, so the machine would, in fact, have to support such
smells eventually. He agreed, and then tried various other angles on convincing
me that there's no way you could prank someone by e-flatulating in their
cubicle. I still wasn't convinced, so we went round and round about email,
rotting flesh, flatulence, and APIs for like 5 minutes before we both sort of
realized that the conversation we were having was sounding more and more
bizarre. At this point I just thanked him for his time and took off.
A little ways up from the Digiscents cubicle a company was demoing some
wireless 3D glasses technology called The Terminator. As I looked on, there were
a number of people standing around with glasses on looking at two monitors that
were running two different Star Wars games, each of which had its image slightly
doubled. As I found out later, the drivers for the glasses take any DirectX or
OGL game and render the even scan lines slightly apart from the odd scan lines.
The shuttered LCD glasses then merge these two images, and it gives you the
impression that the scene in the monitor has depth. I didn't actually expect
this to work very well, so imagine my total shock when I donned the glasses and
watched the Tie Fighter game in a very realistic-looking 3D. Now, I've never
used the Elsa glasses before, so I really don't have the experience to be able
to evaluate this sort of thing. Nonetheless, I was really impressed with what I
saw on the first monitor. The second monitor didn't work quite as well, though,
for whatever reason. It was running that goofy Star Wars racing game, and the 3D
effect wasn't really happening so much with it. But the Tie Fighter game was
killer.
This company is selling their glasses on their
website, but they haven't really started to move the product out into stores
yet. They plan on doing so soon, though, so look for them there.
Ator on Bluetooth and display glasses
There was lots of Bluetooth stuff to be found. Not only did a number of
booths have Bluetooth-enabled products, but there was an entire area dedicated
to Bluetooth products. Unfortunately, they're pretty much all either not
expected until next year, or just demo products not guaranteed to make it into
production. But, it does give an idea of what people are thinking
of. For one thing, most of the major printer manufacturers had enabled
their printers. A number of companies were also showing various Bluetooth
speaker/microphone combos for cell phone communication. Those are sure to
be popular, judging by the number of Comdex attendees who were to be seen
wandering around with cell phone ear pieces permanently wired to their
belts. Basically, lots of stuff that'll be nice to have around, but at
best, most of 'em won't be showing up until at least the middle of 2001.
More on Bluetooth from Will in a bit.
A related family of products that showed up a few times was the glasses-based
display. Most of them were being demoed as ways to watch DVDs, though some
could also accept an RGB connection. Personally, none of them entirely
blew me away, but it's definitely preferable to trying to watch a DVD on a
laptop screen, especially if the airplane passenger in front of you decides to
lean his seat back. Generally, they followed the model of opaque glasses
with dual screens on the inside. The one exception I saw was from a
company called Colorado Micro Display. Theirs was a rectangle of
transparent material that sits over one eye. While I appreciated the
attempt to keep the user connected to the outside world, I found it really
difficult to watch the screen with my other eye open.
One more thing: back when the iMac was the new kid on the block, a lot of
all-in-one computers started showing up, and there was much complaining that the
designs were ripped off from the iMac. Generally, I dismissed those
allegations because it seemed to me that an all-in-one computer would kinda
naturally tend to look more or less like an iMac, at least in terms of shape
(though those manufacturers who used the iMac shape and bondi blue
plastic were definitely showing a lack of innovation). So, I'm not one to
generally hold to those kinds of conspiracy theories. But check out this
picture, and try to tell me it's not a thoroughly blatant rip off of the Cube.
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