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MAY 5, 2000 VOL. 26 NO. 17 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK
Gadgets Seeing the Big Picture Feeling pretty smug about your PC's big 19-inch screen? Panoram Technologies laughs at your puny monitor. Try the California display-maker's PV290 screen for size, a curved, three-panel display with a viewing area 43.5 inches (110 cm) wide by 11.5 inches (29 cm) high. The $27,000 monitor is designed for "perceptual computing," allowing engineers, air traffic controllers and trainee pilots to immerse themselves in the computer-generated image in front of them. If the price tag seems steep, it's a snip compared to previous systems, which cost 10 times as much. Panoram says the price will drop still further and that perceptual computing monitors could find their way onto your desktop within a few years. Providing, of course, you can find a desk big enough. Flash A New Kind of Newsreader Meet Ananova, the world's first virtual newscaster. A shock of green hair is not the only thing that marks her out from other anchors: she also has a supercomputer for a brain. Using advanced text-to-speech software, Ananova reads the news as it breaks at www.ananova.com. No mean feat. Ananova (she hates being called Ana) has to spot that words like "read" can be pronounced in two different ways, and vary the pitch of her delivery to avoid sounding like a monotonous droid. Real-time animation is used to sync her movements and the words with impressive accuracy. Ananova even knows the type of story she is reading, so she can decide whether it deserves a solemn frown, a comic eye-roll or her trademark cheeky smile. E-Vesting Internet or Bust The South Korean economy may be booming again, but not everyone is enjoying the upswing. Data recently released by the Korea Securities Dealers Association sent a chilling message to the country's stockbrokers: go online or die. In March, for the first time ever, the value of shares traded by Koreans on the Net exceeded the amount funneled through conventional brokers. Online transactions made up 51% of the $308-billion turnover for the month, up from 49% in February. Korea's love affair with the Internet shows no sign of slowing. Around 300,000 new online brokerage accounts were created in March, raising the total to 2.71 million - 13.5% of all stock-trading accounts. Innovation Leading the Blind Online While the IT revolution has turned laptops into supercomputers, braille notetakers for the blind have been stuck in the age of the typewriter. No longer. The BrailleNote (www. braillenote.com) is the first notebook computer for the blind. With a built-in modem and Microsoft's Windows CE operating system under the hood, the BrailleNote can swap e-mail and Word documents with any PC. Input is via a braille keyboard and the "screen" is a 32-character strip of pins that are raised and lowered to form the patterns of dots that make up braille letters. A speech synthesizer is also included. The machine can only handle English braille and speech for now, but other languages could be added in the future through a simple software upgrade. A basic BrailleNote unit costs around $3,000. e-mail: stuart_whitmore@asiaweek.com Write to Asiaweek at mail@web.asiaweek.com
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