Panasonic Paints a Bright Future for Televison Displays

The Panasonic booth had some very exciting displays on the show floor this year. Its 150-inch plasma display was obviously one of the main attractions at the show, but I was more excited about the possibility of a Life Wall, which Panasonic describes as an intuitive, intelligent, and interactive TV. This concept TV displays life-size images on the wall, and uses face recognition technology to summon each family members' preferences. Once a user uses hand motions to select the type of entertainment they want to see, Life Wall will resize it depending on the user's movement throughout the room. Users can also customize a room's decor, sort of like a wallpaper, and it even has an IP camera for interactive learning. Anyone who likes the Wii will certainly like the Life Wall. Dory Devlin has more on the Life Wall here and I took some video of it here, so you can see it in action.

Panasonic also demonstrated how wireless high-definition connectivity may someday work throughout our homes. The company displayed a wireless 1080p Full HD transmission system that can transmit uncompressed 1080p Full HD content wirelessly to your TV. You would simply set your high-definition camcorder on top of a boxy wireless transmitter that sits in your living room, and your content would be beamed across the living room straight to your television set without ever being saved to a computer first. Panasonic was also showing off a superthin 1-inch plasma display, displays with SD card slots, and plasmas with double-efficiency technology that cut power consumption in half. It's going to be an exciting decade for television technology.