Just a quick note about SID 2010. The SID exhibition is a great place to see the TV you want in your living room or bedroom, in about five years. This year did not disappoint. The clear, out-and-out winner this year was the LG 84” 3-D Home Theater. Coming on the heels of Avatar, this unit is stunning for its size, clarity, color saturation, and by far the best 3-D of the show in this size group -- at least that I saw. The other truly amazing unit was an LED TV, about 72 inch format, 3mm thick. Very cool on the wall. Often these units never make it to the consumer, but if the LG unit does, it just may find a place in my home.
The best talk at SID, I thought, was the plenary on the history of airplane cockpit design by a veteran Boeing designer (we were in Seattle after all), Mike Sinnett. He had a photo of the first Boeing cockpit – a single seater, and then a photo series of great moments in airplane cockpits. He made the interesting point that the parameters of interest are the number of people up front and the number of windows. This peaked, as I recall, with five people in the front cabin: pilot, copilot, radioman, navigator, and manager. I believe it had seven windows. The last transition was to convince the union that a move from three to two people, even in the biggest plane, is acceptable.
A Boeing cockpit in the very near future (from Google Images, search “Boeing & cockpit”,
this particular image is posted at http://sarmtraining.com/images/b787%20dreamliner-cockpit-2.jpg)
With IODC upon us, this is a short entry, but I didn’t want to miss the chance to send accolades to the speaker. And by the way, to see more interesting Boeing photos, try a Google images search on “Boeing & cockpit”.
The other interesting plenary was from a to-be-unnamed technology company. A very well prepared marketing plenary tried to convince me that one of my hands is now destined to carry a cell phone that I will squint at for all sources of news and entertainment. I refuse to believe this is the future of civilization. This has reinforced my resolve to help bring see-through augmented vision displays to the world, maybe in less than 10 years.
Hope to see you are IODC. Come up, say hello, get a book and the collected works of David Shafer, and let me know how to keep this little site interesting and relevant to you (or, just e-mail me).
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