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Wireless Monitors?
antiopus writes "I didn't think it was possible anytime soon due to bandwidth considerations, but ViewSonic has announced a wireless monitor. At only 10 inches and 800x600, I don't know if it'll be replacing my CRT anytime soon, but I can certainly foresee some interesting applications for wearable/portable computing."
But Viewsonic is marketing this as a "Wireless Monitor", even if it is just a tablet PC doing some remote access.
It hurts when I pee.
Wireless monitors are well and good, but how are they going to identify separate monitors? Does the broadcaster have a unique identifier so that only one monitor can read it?
You can see a whole slew of snooping opportunities...makes that reflective viewing of the monitor rather silly.
But having heard about project 'Mira' it's using 802.11b and the virst versions are meant to be an adjunct to your existing monitor. (dual headed solution)
In OEM quantity, adding the WinCE/wifi/battery only adds about $200 to the price of an LCD monitor anyway.
What's funny is, now that I've got WiFi, I'm using a laptop to do a VERY similar thing (remote control the home office computer from the kitchen) with the added benefit of having a second computer if da wife wants to surf the web while I want to do something. (AND having a real entry system...typing www.blah.com or fritz@wherever.org with any non keyboard entry system is kinda tough)
Further, With the laptop remoteing in, I have access to my email early on Sunday morning without waking up the parrots (they're in the home office) which would then wake up Wifey, makeing her cranky - and by extension - ME cranky.
In short, a good technology evolution, but it probably won't replace your monitor if you want fast games or full screen video (11 mbps is a pretty tiney pipe to run a DVD thru.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I'm an MIS Manager at a small company, and I very often find myself wishing that I had a portable wireless monitor. We run a lot of machines headless, and when they have problems, dragging a monitor over to them can be a real pain. What if all I had to do was get within range, turn on my display, and diagnose the problem? Man, that'd be sweet.
-- Have you ever noticed that at trade shows, Microsoft is always the company that is handing out stress balls?
- The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical.
So, you're telling me "TV" is impractical? TV is bearly more than 640x480x24(?) but there are dozens of devices to transmit analog video around. And none of them "kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer". (at least, not immediately.)You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.
AND, you are assuming every pixel on the screen is changing 60 times per second. That's rarely true. And at any rate, it's far more efficient to send the function calls that are drawing the pixels instead of all half million pixels over and over again.
Latency, schmatency. Build it into the hardware. You get an video card with your standard VGA out, and a transmitter. The card also has some image compression software built in; say, just for arugment sake, PNG. Your wireless reciever, with an LCD screen, has a hardware PNG decoder. Boom. So long as you're not doing full scream video or motion graphics, you're MORE than covered. But even that's overkill. Use something like X, or RDP, where you're not transmitting the screen, you're transmitting the drawing instructions, and the HID coords and actions. Suddenly, instead of transmitting several thousand grey pixels to make your task bar, you're sending 'draw a grey rectangle from here to here.' and being done with it.
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Cause no one's going to spend $900 on a "large format PDA"? Seriously, it's all in how you market your product.
It hurts when I pee.
I see that it includes Media Player and Internet Explorer as well as remote desktop software. If it can combine the two intelligently, it would make a killer combination. "Big heavy" MS apps like Word/Excel/Outlook can run on a "server" machine, and as they don't have rapidly changing complex content so can probably be passed relatively efficiently over Wireless LAN. Multimedia content *might* run locally on the webpad - passed compressed over the network and only decompressed after this bottleneck. If this were the case, it would (just) be possible to watch DVD quality video over a wireless connection!
What this needs is a clever custom interface so that apps execute on the server machine, apart from proxies for Media Player and IE which invoke the real apps on the "monitor". Of course, the same thing would (in theory) be possible with an X-based solution - has anyone done such a thing?
Yeah, but it proves that the editor did not even take the time to read the first paragraph. If he did, he would have added a note on.