Your future on the big screen

LAS VEGAS - Bill Gates may be the visionary, but Panasonic trumps Microsoft in execution.

On Monday, Panasonic President of AVC Networks Toshihiro Sakamoto unveiled several new products at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) aimed at making the promise of "living in high definition" more of a reality--certainly more than the promises offered by Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT) Chairman Gates the previous evening.

As expected, Sakamoto debuted the crowd-pleasing, 150-inch, high-definition plasma television, which now ranks as the world's largest plasma screen. The enormous screen, which was rolled out onstage, features 8.84-million-pixel resolution and is 11 feet by 6.25 feet. Calling the product Life Screen, Sakamoto said that "it gives new meaning to the words 'reality TV.' "

But like Alison in Wonderland, Sakamoto was also ready to scale in a different direction--very, very thin. He next showed off a super-thin, 50-inch plasma TV that is less than 1 inch wide, or 24.77 millimeters, to be exact. It weighs only 22 kilograms and is roughly one-fourth the thickness of older plasmas.

But the Panasonic keynote was about more than just bigger and thinner. It was about changing the user's interactive experience with home entertainment.

The most impressive product was what Panasonic calls the Life Wall, literally a wall that acts like a hypersensitive desktop computer screen. The surface uses software to recognize faces and gestures so that the system can interpret a person's motions and commands. A user can download "furniture," such as bookcases or fireplaces, and decorative elements from the Web, and so make the space suit the surroundings. In a case of reality mimicking art--or, perhaps, reality mimicking virtual reality--the screen looks like a screen shot from a "Sims" house.

But this is no static cyber-wall. A user can motion the wall to play movies, call a friend for an impromptu video teleconference, zoom in on Google Maps and more.

Although Life Wall is in its infancy, Sakamoto expects the product to be ubiquitous in the future. "My dream is to replace one whole wall ... [of everyone's life] with Life Wall," he said. "We envision a future that is all-encompassing."

Exactly when that future would arrive, of course, is still fuzzy. Equally unclear: how many thousands of real dollars it will cost to bring the virtual world into your home or office.

In the meantime, Panasonic has more modest techniques for getting the Web into consumers' living rooms. In conjunction with Google's (nasdaq: GOOG) video and picture teams--YouTube and Picasa--Panasonic plans to launch Internet-connected high-definition TVs, featuring an independently developed technology called Viera Cast. Viera Cast gives users access to YouTube videos, weather information, Internet news broadcasts and Picasa Web albums on their televisions. These Internet-connected televisions should be available by spring 2008, according to Panasonic.

In addition, Panasonic unveiled the first wireless high-definition video transmission system. It can transmit high-def content through "beam-steering technology," which, for consumers, means you can walk in front of your devices without wrecking the picture. The product will also accommodate Blu-ray disc players wirelessly, allowing a consumer to transfer videos from a camcorder by simply placing the camcorder on top of the base. This product is also expected to be available by next year.

If all these technologies work as demo'd, the future will indeed be so bright you may need to wear sunglasses.

(Evelyn Rusli, Forbes.com)