This year, the annual Consumer Electronics Show, known as the world’s biggest trade show on electronic entertainment devices, was held in Las Vegas from January 8^th through January 10^th and revolved all around new display technologies.

For one, the usual stuff: Screen resolutions and refresh rates are higher than ever, colors are more vibrant, and everybody keeps talking about HDTV. Meanwhile, screens have been getting flatter and flatter. Indeed, by now, they’ve become that flat even, one can actually see through them, or, thanks to OLED technology, bend them and fold them up. Samsung is making use of this and, at the trade show, introduced a new cell phone prototype, which promises to satisfy the originally contradicting consumer demands for compact cell phones on the one hand and bigger cell phone screens on the other. While closed, the device isn’t significantly bigger than the average clamshell model cell phone. What’s special is hidden on the inside: a screen that seamlessly (!) extends from one half of the casing to the other and thus gets unfolded to a remarkable total size. Even in half-fold state, the screen works flawlessly.

However, the biggest future trend of this year’s CES can be put in a nutshell that could hardly be more succinct and concise: “3D”. Big high-resolution screens by companies like Philips or Panasonic showing “real” depth effect, without the necessity of old-fashioned 3D-goggles, were absolute show floor attractions that astounded spectators. Besides, numerous manufacturers showed products also revolving around the subject, like 3D-webcams, 3D-projectors, 3D expansion kits for current video game consoles and conventional PCs or new, lighter, wireless shutter glasses. Once more, something’s cooking in the labs of this future technology, which has been waiting for its breakthrough for quite a long time and which in my opinion constitutes the true next step after black and white, sound and color image reproduction in its analog as well as digital realizations.

Tom Hanks, too, was grabbed by the 3D enthusiasm — as seen at a Sony presentation (Source: CES)

Meanwhile, in this context, Spatialview causes a stir with an at first glance completely unspectacular accessory for Apple’s iPhone, which is supposed to vault the touchscreen into the third dimension — without even requiring any electricity supply whatsoever: Essentially, the 3DeeShell is a secondary casing, into which an iPhone may be inserted, and which at its front side has got a detachable viewing panel for the iPhone’s screen. Here’s the trick: The panel is a matrix consisting of pixel-sized lenses, which alternately refract light into two different directions. Now, when a corresponding image is displayed on the iPhone, the pixels of which alternately show two different perspectives of the same object, the lenses “sort” the pixels in respect to the according viewing angle, that is, to the left and the right eye of the person viewing. This way, a “true” visual effect of depth is created without much effort — ingeniously simple. Although this does mean a trade-off against half the screen resolution, this doesn’t seem to outweigh the benefit, as first eyewitness accounts sound very impressed. I.e., The Unofficial Apple Weblog picked Spatialview’s 3DeeShell, announced for a retail price of about $50 US, as the “Most Unexpected Cool Product” of the Macworld Expo 2009, which overlapped with the CES.

But beside all the glittering display splendor, there were other interesting things to see as well. For instance, term-defining PDA-doyens Palm were back, having a great showing with the introduction of their smartphone combatant Prē. Equipped with the new custom operating system Palm WebOS and a touchscreen plus optionally extendable miniature alphanumeric keyboard, the Prē is supposed to excel notably with its multitasking capabilities as well as combine the best of the iPhone and the Blackberry.

Lastly, a company named Horizon deserves mention, which was able to present a market-ready, fuel cell-based battery charger labeled Minipak. It’s intended for mobile devices that can be charged via USB – be that a cell phone, an MP3-player or a PDA. The battery charger is planned to cost a lump sum of $50 US, being refillable with cartridges at around $5 US to $10 US each.