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Home entertainment components usually come with remote controls as user interfaces. When combining components from different vendors, customers end up with a zoo of remote controls at their coffee tables. Most conventional approaches aiming to solve this problem, use some kind of graphical user interface allowing the user to browse through the various functions of each device. Meanwhile, research in speech technology has reached a state where it becomes suitable for the mass market. In this paper, we present a test bed as well as the results of several tests, which we have conducted to elucidate the idea of speech control for spontaneously networked home entertainment systems. Short conclusion: ubiquitous computing and speech control complement each other very sufficiently

Today?s multimedia systems use different types of media with different play-out devices. Currently we are heading towards a situation where for example cellular content providers, the home entertainment industry and networked multimedia over the Internet provide different content and different formats that are incompatible with devices from the other systems. This is in stark contrast with the current trend in the distributed systems and Internet communities where consolidation and interoperation of heterogeneous technologies is a prime target. If the vision of a future integration of different multimedia capable devices should become reality, we must Consolidate the usage of multimedia objects and enable each player to use the different formats. This paper suggests a method and system to achieve such consolidation. We present our initial work and prototyping and aim at stirring a debate around the system to stimulate interest and future research.

COTS — Commercial Off-The-Shelf items — used in electronic military systems present advantages of being state-of-the-art technology, low cost and readily available on the market. Demand to reduce design lead-time and minimize cost bring on an increasing trend to use COTS in military applications. COTS manufacturers design the parts for moderate environmental conditions, which characterizes consumer goods, computers, telecommunications, and home entertainment industries. Military systems require reliable, high quality performance and survival in harsh environment. Therefore, in order to asses the potential risks of COTS implementations in military applications, it is necessary to be acquainted with the parts environmental specifications. This paper presents a survey of mechanical and environmental specifications as presented in various data sheets, by the manufacturers. Observations and concerns results of observations will be presented about issues that have to be addressed in the process of using COTS in military systems.

This article discusses the potential application of augmented reality (AR) in the creation of future interactive entertainment experiences. It describes the production of prototypes using ARToolkit that use physically manipulated AR within television broadcast production and in home entertainment for children.

This paper addresses a potential method to advance acoustic landmine detection by increasing operator and equipment standoff range from the minefield and developing a lightweight system that is potentially more practical than many currently researched systems. In this study, a parametric array acoustic source is evaluated to understand its potential for landmine detection. The array can transmit audible signals over 100 meters in air and has a weight of just four pounds. A proof-of-concept system was built at M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory that uses a commercial parametric source to insonify the ground and excite buried mines. A commercial laser vibrometer was then used to measure the displacement velocity at the ground surface on and off the mine. This system has been demonstrated at an outdoor landmine facility and has measured signatures from buried anti-personnel mines. The overall concept shows promise; however, the parametric source used in this preliminary test was developed for home entertainment and will require substantial modification to be practical for landmine detection.

A summary is provided of a comprehensive industry status report and roadmap available from www.usdc.org. Continued improvements in LCD technology are being driven by home entertainment applications, leading to better color and video response. Competing technologies, such as PDP and OLED and electronic paper must either exploit inherent advantages for such applications or focus on other market niches that are not being addressed well by mainline LCD technology. Flexible displays provide an opportunity for innovative technologies and manufacturing methods, but appear to bring no killer applications.

The Omni Remote is able to operate a home entertainment system including a radio from a device installed on a wheelchair tray for a person with cerebral palsy. The remote control device is embedded into the wheelchair tray so as to not interfere with the use of the tray. A radio, for use while traveling, is mounted in a custom fabricated hubcap of the wheelchair.

The Omni Entertainment Control System (OECS) allows simple push-button button remote control of a home entertainment system through preprogrammed command sequences. This device is designed for persons with disabilities, and uses a microprocessor and large memory technology to store preprogrammed command sequences.

This paper introduces the Everywhere Displays projector, a device that uses a rotating minor to steer the light from an LCD projector onto different surfaces of an environment and a pan/tilt camera to sense interaction with the projected surface. The ED-projector is a generic I/O ubiquitous device that is able to create graphical interfaces on non-wired surfaces, to access computational power and networked data. Also, ED-projectors can be used to augment reality without the use of goggles. In both cases, ED-projectors can be used to create a new generation of games that are played by one or more users on the real world, without requiring them to wear goggles neither asking for specially wired surfaces or objects. Some ideas of the games that can be created with the ED-projector are introduced and examined.

Sydney Pollack, director. Sketches of Frank Gehry . Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Culver City, 2005, 83 mins., DVD, $19.99, http://www.sonypictures.com/ Frank Gehry (nee Goldberg): a man, a genius, an architect responsible for an entire classification of architectural effect (The Bilbao Effect). This is the Frank Gehry that Sydney Pollack’s 2005 film Sketches of Frank Gehry portrays. Providing a familiar outline of what constitutes artistic genius, from discussions of Gehry’s first job (as a truck driver), to his frustrations in school (including an F in his first class on perspective) to his obstacles in his personal life (notably, a controlling first wife) to his early architectural projects and his later, more extravagant ones, Sketches gives a glimpse of Gehry who, despite his setbacks, defies all odds and carves a singular space for himself and his architecture. His genius, cultivated through personal struggle and revealed through his architecture, lay precisely in his ability to prosper from an exceptional position in which he found himself both in life and in architecture—not quite modern, not quite postmodern, not quite artist, not quite architect. Who, we are led to think, but someone with true genius could look at a model of his work, smile, and say, “That is so stupid looking it’s great.” Sketches of Frank Gehry focuses on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as the moment when Gehry burst onto the global scene. A montage of publications …

This report is an overview of a joint project between the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) Lamp Section and the Electronics Industries Association (EIA) Consumer Electronics Group. It addresses the interactions between electronic, screwbase, self-ballasted compact fluorescent lamps (CPLs) or ballasted adapters; and infra-red (IR) remote controls typically used with TVs or home entertainment devices. The committee examined the history of the interactions, performed testing, and proposed solutions. This has benefited NEMA and EIA and alerted other industries developing IR systems, such as computers and videoconferencing, to address solutions in the design stage of product development.

In future domestic environments, we will have various home appliances that are connected to home networks. Connecting these appliances requires middleware for providing high level functionalities that hides details of complex issues about respective home appliances. The middleware should be simple and extensible. Also, the middleware needs to access various services on the Internet in an easy way because it is very important to provide future home entertainments that access Internet services.In this paper, we show our Web-based middleware for home computing environments. Recently, many companies have announced to sell Web-based home appliances. Our middleware enables us to integrate these appliances without their modifications. Also, our middleware allows us to build attractive future home applications that are connected to the Internet. We also show some experiences with our current prototypes and describe current ongoing work to improve the current system.

In this paper, we examine the requirements for future middleware to support mobile and pervasive applications and identify key research areas. We illustrate the research areas with requirements identified in two specific research projects concerning pervasive healthcare and home entertainment.

In this paper we outline the design and the implementation of the multimodal presentation planner PMO, which is part of the EMBASSI intelligent user interface for home entertainment devices. We provide details about the concepts we use to produce cohesive and coherent output as well as illustrate the software architecture of the PMO. We compare our approach with the state of the art in presentation planning and conclude with an illustration of our future work.

Publisher Summary This chapter summarizes the key findings and forecast results of a report on the diode laser industry. The size, quality, and particularly the price, of substrates and wafers are key factors in determining the ability of companies to produce competitive laser products. The family of devices that come under the title of diode lasers is one of the most important in today's electronics industry. The diode laser not only permits the high-speed processing, but also the storage of data—that is, information, audio, and video. It thus underpins a huge range of products from fiber optic communications through computers to home entertainment systems. It thus underpins a huge range of products from fiber optic communications through computers to home entertainment systems. The market is thus diverging and extending its market value. The market information provided here is intended to assist with business planning for the next five years as the market extends, diversifies, and builds on its strengths to become a multibillion dollar per year business.

In order to be successful in the home, micro-display technologies face significant challenges to displace conventional CRT solutions. Besides needing to offer a unique value to the end-user, micro-displays must be cost competitive and offer equivalent or better video reproduction performance. We will review our results in the basic requirements to succeed in the home environment. We have developed several technologies to advance DMDTM technology to meet those requirements including high speed interfaces that enable virtual elimination of color sequential artifacts, improved contrast, and package cost reduction.

As a result of the fast growth of population exposure to the electromagnetic fields (EMF) there should be increased attention to protection against adverse effects of the fields. The main aspects of the protection are: general public, work safety, biosphere as a whole, lithosphere and devices and systems. Not only the natural world but also any man-made device and system is potentially susceptible to EMF. It may be said, in some simplification, that there is hardly no device or system, especially electric-or electronic one, that would not be affected by direct or indirect EMF irradiation. A good example of the immunity of an electric car for the disabled was shown in a movie demonstrated by Howard Bassen during BEMS Meeting in Copenhagen in 1994. The author has presented at EMC Symposia several papers on the susceptibility of the home entertainment electronic devices1. To illustrate it in Fig.l a susceptibility limit of a multimeter is shown. The immunity is the reason why aboard a plane we are asked not to use any electronic devices, even laptop computers. Presently we are requested, but in the near future we may face more serious problems if we decide to use them2.

In 1973, final energy consumption in the residential sector was 38 Mtoe, which could be broken down into 73% for heating, 15% for hot water and cooking and 11% for other specific electricity uses2. With the oil crisis, we became aware of the risk of shortages and efforts were focused on reducing our energy bills, especially for heating. Twenty years on, the residential sector accounts for 48 Mtoe, in other words, 30% more than in 1973. Our efforts to reduce energy consumption have brought the proportion used for heating down to 55%, but electricity used for specific purposes now represents more than 23% of the total.

Technology develops rapidly, but the psychological and emotional make-up of people changes only imperceptibly. Therefore the effects on the viewers, described in the previous chapter, cannot be altered by satellite broadcasts, laser beam systems, or wall projections in your own future “home entertainment center.”

Kookaburra Holdings is a retail conglomerate. Sales revenues for 1993 were in the region of £3550 m, with an overall operating profit of £210 m. Kookaburra’s interest are essentially in retailing consumer products across a diverse merchandise range of home improvement, consumer durables, healthcare, automotive, home entertainment, office equipment and a variety of mix merchandise offer. In addition to the retailing activities there are support companies in retail finance (a store credit card) and property operations.

In this paper, the author presents a biography of entrepreneur Scott Jones, describes how Jones built a better voicemail system and how he now hopes to do the same for home entertainment.

The synergy between computing and information systems promises to herald a new epoch in which users not only have access to mundane services, such as television, radio, and telephones, but they also have access to an entirely new variety of entertainment services that are automatically customized to suit their individual needs. The authors explore the architectural considerations that underlie the realization of personalized multimedia entertainment services over metropolitan-area broadband networks, and devise near-optimal information caching strategies to determine when, where, and for how long video programs must be cached, so as to minimize the cumulative storage and network costs borne by users. >

Interest in multimedia applications has risen dramatically of late, in large measure due to significant advances in key enabling technologies and the rapid convergence of telephone, cable TV, and entertainment conglomerates. While the mass-media has focused very tightly on the impact of these developments on the home entertainment industry, it seems that, somewhere lost in the shuffle, has been a broad class of services centered on multimedia business communications. Based on a strong belief that such services can significantly improve company communications at many levels, we have been targeting our research to explore potential applications and enabling technologies relevant to this market segment. The paper presents a broad discussion of first-hand experiences of developing distributed multimedia applications. The authors describe several of the business-oriented applications they have constructed and some of the tools and techniques developed to assist in the process. They also discuss some of their latest experiences with high-speed networking technology (specifically ATM) for supporting distributed multimedia applications. >

New optical technology takes 3-D light-years beyond the cheesy effects of 1950s horror movies. Audiences flocked to Avatar—which set records for gross sales—and dozens of new 3-D films are in the works. In addition, 3-D televisions are being marketed as the next big thing in home entertainment. Yet a troubling question remains: Why does watching 3-D make some people sick?

As advanced new technologies such as HDTV, broadband and ultra-high performance 3D game engines make their way into consumer's living rooms, Location Based Entertainment (LBE) venues will be hard pressed to deliver high-impact experiences that cannot be had in the home. This presentation will summarize the unique requirements of LBE's and describe several ways in which LBE displays might differentiate themselves from home entertainment technologies over the next 5 years. Examples to be discussed include auto-stereo systems, enhanced reality displays, infinity optics, and very wide field of view immersive displays.

Our experience has shown that participating in computer classes brings tangible improvements to the quality of life of older learners. While some of these benefits may derive from social interaction, many more are specific to the nature of the course. Learning to use the versatile computer does not require any particular talent, yet it allows the exercise of a wide range of skills. The achievements of our participants include a novel, poetry, short stories, family histories, and a cook book. Others have catalogued collections and undertaken voluntary administrative duties, plus much more.