3:56 PM 11/21/1997
DWIGHT SILVERMAN
LAS VEGAS -- Every year, hundreds of thousands of people converge on this city built on greed, lust and bad taste to get a glimpse of the future of computing. On the show floor at Fall Comdex, they find the latest products that are either available now, or will be in the next few months.
But in the show's meeting rooms, far from the hordes of gawking technoweenies, you can get a longer view of the future.
For example, in IBM's suite is Mark Lucente, a 33-year-old researcher who is trying to figure out a better way for humans to interact with computers. He believes computers should adapt to the way humans communicate, rather than the other way around.
"Have you ever watched someone typing at a computer?" he asks, assuming the traditional workstation position, eyes staring straight ahead. "They look like they're dead. That's not a natural position."
Then Lucente stands in front of a giant projection TV screen and points at the display. "Put a circle there," he says. And the computer connected to the screen puts a small, 3-D ball right where he points.
"Make it this big," Lucente says, drawing his hands about a foot apart. The ball increases to a diameter of about a foot.
The image of a Las Vegas casino appears onscreen, and as he moves forward, the image enlarges. When he backs up, the picture moves away -- just as it would if you were walking through the room.
Although these are high-tech parlor tricks for now, the implications are mind-boggling for Lucente's research. He envisions computer desktops that are literally the tops of desks; screen-based billboards on the street that would let you check your e-mail; educational screens that would let students walk through the streets of ancient Greece.
Such things, he says, are five to 10 years away. They'll require displays that are much cheaper than the overpriced screens we have today.
"See that painting over there? Those will soon be replaced by electronic displays that may cost $50," Lucente says.
However, we've got a long way to go. Over in the meeting rooms run by NEC Technologies, there's a 42-inch plasma-screen display designed to work with high-definition TV, or HDTV. The screen, which will cost about $14,000, is only three inches thick and can be hung on a wall.
The quality of the image is astounding -- better than that of a motion picture screen. The NEC engineers have a video of a helicopter tour of Devil's Tower in Wyoming that shows off the crystal-clear picture.
HDTV will begin appearing next year, and while you don't need something this fancy to watch it, the idea of a flat-panel screen on the wall to display TV -- a science fiction notion only a few years ago -- is now very close to reality.
Want something a bit more practical?
If you asked the folks at Sony's booth very nicely, they will take you into a dark corner and show you a notebook computer that is now selling in Japan and probably will make an appearance here later this year.
It is less than an inch thick, weighs less than three pounds and is about 10 by 8 inches. It has a 10-inch active-matrix screen, a 1.6 gigabyte hard drive, a built-in 33,600-bit-per-second modem, 32 megabytes of memory and a 133-megahertz Pentium processor.
The best part -- it has a keyboard you can comfortably type on. Sony has shaved 2 millimeters off each key, making it only slightly smaller than a conventional keyboard. There's even a wrist rest on it. So far, there's no pricing set for when -- or if -- it comes to the United States, but the Japanese model sells for the equivalent of $2,500.
Notebooks on display from Hitachi and Mitsubishi are similar to Sony's, though their keyboards aren't as usable.
There are lots of small, cool things here, from tiny digital cameras to computers you wear like a moneybelt.
One of my tiny favorites is the new $200 Clik drive from Iomega. This tiny hard drive is about the size of a Zippo lighter, connects to a computer's parallel port and holds removable 40-megabyte disks that are about the size of the old silver dollars, pre-Susan B. Anthony, and cost $9.95 each. Iomega hopes to make the disks ubiquitous, so they can be used in all kinds of devices, from digital cameras to handheld computers.
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