HP goes wideboy

TECHNOLOGY GIANT HP has shown off a wide-to-the-power-of-three high definition display at a US conference over the weekend.

HP CTO Phil McKinney demo'd what he called a "triple-wide high-definition" display at the Displaysearch Emerging Technologies conference in California. The display can show an entire basketball court in one seamless superwide shot.

"You get a fresh, seamless experience. You can see end to end, the entire width of the court," McKinney said told the attendees, according to Venture Beat.

It's not all imaged through one super wide camera to get the shot. Apparently the technology pins together different shots from several cameras and stitches them together to create the effect. Sounds to us like it's a similar approach to filming 3D with two slightly different angles to create that effect. Only this time instead of heading for the third dimension, HP is creating wide, wide, wide shots.

HP was one of the first companies to market interactive touch control displays on its Touchsmart PCs but it isn't using that technology for these displays. This makes sense. Who wants to get up from the sofa to walk from one end of this display behemoth to the other to perform a giant zoom gesture? The physics don't quite fit.

Of course, there is something called a remote control but McKinney wouldn't want anything as inelegant in this biometric, multi-touch augmented world. So McKinney and his team at HP are working on the interactive technology of the day, gesture control. There'll also be voice control, but that's resolutely old hat by now.

So, wildly flailing your arms around, gesticulating like a loon while your favourite local sports team gets a whupping? Sounds like that shouldn't be too hard to sell into the installed base. µ