Tech Horizons

Digitizing Oral Histories By Paul Parrie, June 9, 2010 How a digitization project is bringing together technology, collections, library science, and online interface design Oral histories bring the past to life. Whether remembrances of a battle fought in World War II or a More..
Can You Hear Me Now? By Virginia Rubey, May 12, 2010 Web Conferencing Encourages Communication in Unlikely Ways Soliya offers group polling capabilities, a More..
3D Audio Comes to Conferencing February 25, 2010 vSpace offers a more realistic approach to the sound of conferencing. Videoconferencing and telepresence systems continue to make advances in recreating the sense of “being there,” but, for the most part, these advances have More..
Virtual Conferencing December 17, 2009 An avatar-based alternative to videoconferencing. More..
The Laser Microphone November 4, 2009 The revolutionary approach to sound. David Schwartz and his Laser-Accurate microphone prototype, which trades mechanical moving parts for the measurement by a laser of the movement of More..
The Eyes Have It(2) By Tim Kridel, October 14, 2009 A look at new developments in eye-tracking technology Displays are for looking at, but increasingly those displays are looking back. The latest example: bidirectional microdisplays under development at the Fraunhofer Institute More..
NICT Shows The Video Future At Nab By Mark Schubin, June 18, 2009 At last April’s National Association of Broadcasters Expo, the video images shown in the southeast corner of the NICT booth were probably the smallest, grainiest, and hardest to see in the 87-year history of the NAB convention. More..
It’s a flat av world May 14, 2009 Video displays aren’t the only technology that’s growing thinner.  Flat loudspeakers have been around a long time — almost as long as loudspeakers themselves. Patents dating back to 1929 granted to E.W. Kellogg described the More..
Touch This By Kate Green, February 23, 2009 The next generation of touchscreen devices may replace the mighty mouse.Earlier this week, the humble computer mouse celebrated its 40th birthday. While surprisingly little has changed since Doug Engelbart, an engineer at More..
Lamp-Free Projectors November 3, 2008 It's consistently the number one complaint about using video projectors - replacing those lamps that provide all those lumens can be expensive, inconvenient, and time-consuming. All that may be More..
Minimizing Packet Loss July 17, 2008 The concept of a video phone call dates back to the overly- cited AT&T "Picturephone" demonstration at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. Yet videoconferencing, as we now call it, still has yet to become a mainstream More..
Are Feds in Your Future? May 21, 2008 While the flat panel display technology alternatives seem to be limited to TFT-LCDs or plasmas, some video purists still lament the demise of the old cathode ray tubes (CRT) that have served us so well since the beginning of More..
Ever Thinner January 1, 1900 How thin is too thin? TV and flat panel displays continue to push the boundaries of this dimension. One of the most compelling features of flat screen displays has always been their inherent “thinness” relative to now nearly More..