Tag: CEATEC

Riding a bicycle isn't exactly easy, especially if you're made of circuitry, wires, and a gyroscope. That was Murata Seisaku-kun's one trick, and now he's sadly obsolete. Meet Seiko, a 20-inch tall, 11 pound unicycle riding robot. Like her, uh, "cousin" Keisaku-kun, Seiko relies on a chest-mounted gyro to stay upright and uses Bluetooth to communicate with a PC that gives instructions. (Yes, she's ...

Recently, we went to Tokyo helping pick out the coolest and most innovative new technologies at CEATEC, the annual Japanese consumer electronics show. Along with four other reps from Popular Science, CNET, and the Envisioneering Group, we narrowed down our short list to just ten items, either finished products or promising prototypes with some sort of vague plan to eventually get released. It ...

Facial-recognition specialist OMRON has unveiled its latest catalyst in bringing about the impending marketing and focus-group apocalypse. It's a "smile detector" -- essentially a piece of software capable of objectively measuring the smiles of humans (and eventually humanoids, we presume), and attributing to them a percentage rating. Enjoying that television show/site/"adult film"? Pretty soon ...

A year ago, who'd have thunk that America would have gone gaga for the motion-sensitive, hand-gesture-and-remote based controls of the Nintendo Wii. It seemed like an out-there way to maneuver and control your way around the game console's interface and gameplay. And yet, one year later, the Nintendo Wii is the best-selling next-gen console. So it's no surprise that motion-sensitive, gesture ...

First they got flat, then they got big, and now, with nowhere else to go, TVs are getting thin, thin, thin! At least that's the trend we're extracting from all of the ultra-slim TVs on display at CEATEC, the annual Japanese consumer electronics show we're currently checking out in Tokyo. Take a look at the above-pictured Hitachi super-flat 32-inch LCD-TV prototype, which, at just .72-inches ...

The annual Japanese consumer electronics show (also known as CEATEC) in Tokyo is usually a good place to see some of the cutting-edge technologies that might make their way to the U.S. a few years from now. It's also a good place to see esoteric, only-in-Japan type stuff that never makes it across the pond. It's a gee-whiz-gadget-lover's paradise, and Switched was lucky enough to be asked to ...