One of the things that’s great about CES is finding the incredible new products from first time exhibitors at the show. Many of these products don’t start out in your 100‘x100’ booths like you would find Sony, Microsoft, or Panasonic displaying their products in. Usually they’re off the beaten path and simply glad to be there in an 8’x8’ draped booth and scraped together any and all resources they could just to be there. Such is the case with Skyline International and their universal 3D glasses. Skyline is a very unique company that focuses on connecting, branding, and packaging resources and products internationally for clients.
This year they were showing of their universal 3D glasses. The great part about these glasses is that they’re 3D glasses work with the major manufacturer’s 3D TV’s but are a fraction of the cost of the 3D TV manufacturers standard glasses. Their shutter frame, active technology infrared glasses will help reduce the costs and make the 3D home theater more cost friendly for the consumer market. Expect these glasses to arrive on the market around the $130 price point. This is in comparison to the brand name glasses from Sony, Samsung, and LG that cost upwards of $180.Additional features of these glasses include the ability to charge them via USB and they will allow you to use them for 60 hours of viewing on a 4 hour charge. They’re easy to use with a single button to turn them on and “sync” them to the TV. When you take the glasses off they will power off automatically after 5 seconds. The glasses were also designed to fit comfortable and have 3 different interchangeable nose pieces which eliminates the slipping or pinching that happens with the one size fits all standard brand name glasses.
The one feature that stood out the most when reading through the specs on these glasses was the feature of using them exclusively for left and right pictures. This will allow these glasses to work in the future with products like the multi-player viewing patent screens like Sony and others are in the works of developing. If you’re interested in reading more about this technology you can view our blog about it here- The 3D TV That Will Give You Double The View
Skyline’s Universal 3D glasses are so new that they don’t have a web site up to deliver additional information on their glasses as of the time of the show and this blog. You will however be able to find them soon at retail and online store fronts including Best Buy and Amazon.com. In addition we’ve asked their representatives to post comments to this blog with updates about their product and give you the information and links when their product web site is completed and online. Check back or subscribe to the RSS feed for this post to keep up to date with this technology.
The other big announcement of the day came when Skype came forward with the big announcement that they are purchasing the mobile phone video company Qik. Skype CEO Tony Bates mentioned that this decision was made because it fit with their companies focus on mobile video business. This is of course on the heels of their latest release of their ever popular iPhone App that now allows you to do video chatting via your iPhone and not just from a computer web cam anymore.
Bates said, “Video is now the next frontier for the company. Video was more than one third of the focus of their goals and investment for 2010. Over 40% of Skype users now include video. Over 4 million downloads of their iPhone video call App was recorded just on December 21st of 2010 alone.
Skype’s purchase of Qik will help them to further expand and provide consistent video group capabilities. Skype group video can now handle 10 individuals and will cost $8.99 per month. This also is part of their plan to push Skype into people’s living rooms. Companies such as Vizio, Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba all now have Skype installed along with other manufacturers including them in their media boxes and Blu-ray players.
