Philips' CES booth tour
Post-sale of the one millionth Ambilight, the mood at the Philips booth was understandably upbeat. How did they celebrate? By shipping in dozens of Ambilight equipped displays, and creating one -- which you've already seen -- that has a whole lot of diamonds on it.
Philips' CES booth tour
The Philips amBX should totally win an award for most oddball device which also happens to take itself seriously. This thing includes two mini-Ambilights, two fans (yes, fans), and a rumble keyboard wrist rest. Whenever anything "exhilarating" happens on screen, these three components combine in an effort to immerse the user. Based on our quick demonstration, your face would get pretty cold after a few hours of running around maps in Quake 4.
You'd be able to see the extra (read: 3rd) dimension that this Philip' prototype 3D display can emulate if a), we'd have photographed it using a non-existent camera that can capture three dimensions, and b), you were reading Engadget on one of Philips' prototype 3D displays. At least you wouldn't need any of those red and green tinted glasses.
According to the Philips representative that walked me around the booth, the Ambilight Mark 2 will look something like this. Instead of shining onto a wall, a clear bezel and lights around the corners of the display will match the color on the screen.
Bigger is very often better, but this is verging on weird. At least its traditionally weird.
Two hooked up Philips PMPs.
This is the AmbiSound, which is a solution for virtual surround sound on nothing more than a 2.1 system. Yeah, it doesn't emulate a full surround sound system altogether that well -- the clue's in the "virtual" -- but it looks pretty good and is definitely compact, which is sort of the point with these kinds of devices.
Ambilight purgatory?
Over at Philips' demo of their wireless HDMI transmitter, a bunch of techies were fiddling around trying to get the blank display to accept a signal. Our suggestion that they should just connect the DVD player to the TV with a HDMI cable wasn't appreciated.
Remotes, remotes everywhere, but not a TV within IR range to sync.
