Glasses deliver a different view
Eyetop Centra
Private mobile video display
$499, Ingenio SAS
www.eyetop.net
Count this reviewer among the ranks of gadget lovers easily ensnared by the sales literature for this pioneering product that surely anticipates the future, as real reality makes room for virtual reality on this ever-more-wired planet.
Eyetop’s Centra amounts to a sturdy pair of sunglasses with a tiny video screen implanted in the left lens and stereo earbuds coming out of the side arms. The idea is to make it possible to walk down the street–or maybe even sit at one’s workstation–and watch television, DVD movies or computer games on the sly.
Despite appearances, this is not the science-fiction dream of virtual reality glasses, in which the video seems to surround the viewer like sitting in Row 1 at IMAX. Think instead of sitting a few feet away from a 14-inch TV.
With practice, one learns to relax and keep both eyes open, thus monitoring one’s surroundings while quietly taking in the content being fed into the frames by video devices plugged in to the Centra’s composite video-input box–about the size of a pregnant iPod.
The manufacturer notes that Centra is a way of watching stuff from portable DVD players with much better screen presence than the 6-inch displays they include. In tests for this review, the experience was as advertised.
However, the frames are much heavier than other eyewear, and one needs to constantly fiddle with the nosepiece to keep the display in view for the right eye. Users of prescription eyeglasses must do without them, making the left eye a blurry affair.
Still, if you take a lot of long airplane flights, or if you want to watch TV in the same room with a book reader, this $500 gadget delivers nicely.
CVS
Disposable digital takes its 1st shot
The CVS pharmacy chain is the first player in this throwaway world to offer a disposable 25-picture digital camera with the same kind of LCD viewfinder found in regular digital cameras.
The $19.99 CVS Digital One-Time-Use Camera lets users see each shot in a 1.4-inch color screen. Users can instantly view and delete unwanted images, thus saving big on the snap-it-once-and-hope-for-a-good-picture process used by other disposable cameras.
BOOKS
Author uncovers journalism shift
“We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People,” ($25.95, O’Reilly Press) by Dan Gillmor, a veteran writer at the San Jose Mercury News, ably captures the players and tricks behind the blogs and bloggers that often blindside the traditional media giants.
Gillmor uncovers the news-gathering shift with tales of hobbyist muckrakers like “acidrabbit” and war reporters like “Zayed,” whose Healing Iraq dispatches cover ground action that no foreigner can reach in that dangerous country. http://wethemedia.oreilly.com
