Texas Instruments Outlines Vision Of The Future Of Home Entertainment

Texas Instruments (TI) outlined at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) its vision of the type of entertainment which will prevail in the home of the future, and of how its Digital Light Processingô (DLPô) technology will play a key role.""For most people, home entertainment has always been primarily a passive experience which doesn't really engage the viewer,"" said Dale Zimmerman, Home Entertainment Product Manager. ""It's something which happens to you - you don't make it happen. But with the increasing communications bandwidth and with numerous new services and new digital media, we believe that the current era of predominantly passive home entertainment is drawing to a close. The home entertainment experience of the future will be characterized by interaction, involvement and immersion. It will become both a personal experience in which the viewer will have many choices to make, and also a shared experience as large, high definition screens allow the whole family to participate.""""We know that we're far from being the only ones with a vision of the future of home entertainment,"" continued Zimmerman, ""and there are many forums where these visions are discussed. What we're not seeing or hearing, though, is discussion of the enormous impact on home entertainment content that will arise from the availability of enormous bandwidth and very large, high resolution displays. What's needed is a forum in which service providers, media providers, content providers and equipment providers can discuss the issues and, ideally, form a consensus about the way forward.""What we're not seeing or hearing, though, is discussion of the enormous impact on home entertainment content that will arise from the availability of enormous bandwidth and very large, high resolution displays. What's needed is a forum in which service providers, media providers, content providers and equipment providers can discuss the issuesZimmerman went on to describe how he saw the increasing convergence of media that are, today, separate - notably the convergence of broadcasting with the Internet - to creative an exciting new interactive home entertainment experience in which digital images of unparalleled sharpness, clarity and realism will be combined with content-rich graphics and a range of electronic services. This will be enabled by what he described as ""the bandwidth explosion"" which is taking place, enabling huge amounts of video and graphics data to be downloaded to each home.""The focal point of this new paradigm in the home will be a large display,"" he added. ""It may be rear projected or front projected, but it will be capable of simultaneously displaying copious amounts of information from a wide range of sources. Because all of the sources will be digital, we believe that the ideal display technology will also be digital. From that point of view alone, DLP has a unique opportunity to become the de facto display technology for the home of the future because it is an all-digital display technology.""DLP technology has, until now, been available primarily to users of business projectors ñ from industry-leading 'ultra ultra portables' to high brightness systems used in conventions, trade shows and in leisure venues. This year, however, is expected to see the launch of large screen, HD-capable home entertainment systems - based on DLP technology - from Hitachi and Mitsubishi as a result of agreements signed with those companies in the first half of 1999.