
This is a wall TV/family organiser from Sharp Electronics. Panasonic has shown off similar wall TV concepts, so this shouldn't be too far away from being seen in living rooms.
Ceatec runs this week in Chiba outside of Tokyo. More than 33,000 visitors attended the show on its opening day, according to the Ceatec Japan 2007 site.
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Sharp is also showing off prototypes of a thin LCD. It's only 20mm thick. And, as the photos show, it can be lowered and raised to fit inside furniture.
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A piece of exercise equipment from National, the sister company of Panasonic in the Matsushita conglomerate. Matsushita wants to get into selling more white goods and household appliances.
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Dynaconnective's iPod accessories and TVs are pretty cool. This TV comes with a built-in DVD player and sells for around $550 (£270).
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A set-top box sporting IVDR (information versatile disk for removable usage) technology. Basically, it's a portable hard drive.
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Dolby, which just officially opened a Japanese branch, is showing off technologies for 3D cinema and for bringing greater contrast to LCD TVs. The R2D2 is the one from the movies. The C3PO is a stand-in.
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Nostalgia never dies. First there's Star Wars, and now the HD DVD group gives away Star Trek-themed bags.
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The Research Institute of Organic Electronics is showing off a folding display of organic light emitting diodes. Various companies are trying to bring OLED lights to commercial reality, with durability and lifetime the big question marks. The lights here put out a lowly 12 lumens per watt, but the institute wants to raise it to 60 lumens per watt in the next few years and get the lights to last 10,000 hours. OLED lights consume very little energy.
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A security robot from Alsok. It gives out information about the conference -- and it doesn't come with a taser.
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A bank of LCD TVs. No matter how many of these one sees, the effect remains somewhat cool.
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It's the Rolly from Sony, a gyrating egg that dances to music. People are going nuts for it -- the Rolly exhibit is among the most popular at Ceatec.
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Sony's 11-inch OLED TV hits the Japanese market on 1 December. Here's a larger OLED prototype from the side. It's skinny all right.
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Sony's oddly named Smile Shutter. The user pushes the photo button halfway and the camera then takes the photo by itself when it detects the subject smiling. We tried it a bunch of times and the camera didn't do diddly until the model grinned.
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Pioneer's image recognition navigation system. When the device sees what you're looking for, it blocks it out in colour, so you can turn.
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Sharp is showing off a touchscreen that lets you control the interface with finger swipes. Just as with Apple's iPhone, you can flick to shrink the size of images, blow them up and scroll left to right or up and down. The device is called the "system LCD with embedded optical sensors" -- not quite as catchy a name as iPhone.
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A floor model shows off a Sharp TV phone.
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In Asia, the concept of booth babe has yet to die. This guy, a casual visitor to the show, decided to comment on the phenomenon.
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Salarymen and women leave the show after a long first day of Ceatec.
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