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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."
Sheesh.
-- Hulver's site
Note from the article that the "10 inches" applies to the maximum range of the wirelessness. I guess it'll keep wire clutter off the desk. No other real use. Except maybe a sensitive Tempest monitor.
Now I can pump even MORE radiation into my brain. My cell phone, pager, laptop, computer, wireless mouse/keyboard and CB radio aren't enough... Must... have... cancer...
Dave------
http://cooltech.org
If it ain't cool, it ain't coolt
Knowing Slashdot... I restrained myself from totally flipping out, after ACTUALLY READING the page, it's just a badly named WinCE Tablet PC. Is it even possible to make a true wireless monitor? I'd think you'd need a whole new type of video card for that. Any thought?
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
True: wireless monitors are still a bit far in the future... any guy with high school maths can work out the bandwidth required for "true" wireless and any telecoms engineer can tell you thats a heckuva lotta hertz.
What's interesting, though, is the possibility of modifying these thin clients to run our fav OS's (or at least run X remotely. Imagine being able to hack one of these so that you can use it like any standalone system... Can you say luggable PDA?
You still got to plug it in, right?
Won't the MPAA be banning this technology soon enough? Pretty soon, you'll be able to transmit your HDTV feeds and such to all of the neighbors and share cable/satellite bills.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Under 'Liberate yourself from your desktop'
"Establish a one-to-one relationship with your PC."
Sorry, I prefer to be a slut and have relationships with lots of PCs.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
A wireless LCD monitor would certainly be welcome, but wireless keyboard and a Gyration Gyromouse are a bit more of a priority, as they're input devices which means you pretty much have to .aha. tangle .aha. with them.
Any good recommendations on a real quality wireless keyboard are welcome.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Mine is 2.5 lbs, has an integrated keyboard, mouse, soundcard, camera and hard drive.
It runs Linux and has a wireless network card.
(It's my 2 year old Sony vaio...)
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
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."
Tablet PCs run Windows XP. The AirPanel is a large PDA running the terminal server client.
Wirelessly access files, applications and/or data...New Windows CE .NET operating system from Microsoft And a touch display panel.
It's not so much a wireless monitor but a PC-integrated PDA. It runs Remote Desktop via 802.11b to your PC and uses a stylus to manipulate data on the monitor. Besides, how many monitors use PCMCIA cards? Also judging from the hardware inside (206 MHz, 128 meg SDram, 2Mb video card), it gives an impression of a 13" wide iPaq. If given the choice, I would stick with a notebook. Sure it's heavier than the 2+ lbs. monitor, but more current generations of laptops can handle much more than this monitor. If you really wanted to buy this for the desktop broadcasting, add an 802.11b and run your favorite remote desktop.
This
I work in the RF industry as a software engineer... I'm by no means an RF engineer, but I have to comment.
First of all, this is not a wireless monitor. It is a portable PC that communicates with other PCs via a network card. The video signal is NOT sent over the air.
The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it.
Just a quick estimation (please don't criticize this, I have other work to do):
800 x 600 = 480,000 pixels
480 pixels x 16-bit = 7.68 Mb = 960 kB
960 kB x 60 Hz = 57.6 MB / s!
Given that 802.11b provides 11 Mb as a MAXIMUM (yes, that's bits, which translates to 1.4 MB / s), we'd only have about 1/50th the bandwidth necessary. And that doesn't account for automatic rate switching, interference, and other nodes on the network.
Of course, there's no hacking required.
Step 1: Acquire one of Bill's "Tablet PC's"
Step 2: Download VNC from ATT for WinCE, and your *nix box
Step 3: Setup Xvnc on *nix box, vncviewer on the tablet
Voila!
A>
By my calculations, 800x600 16 bit color at 60Hz means you're sending 460,800,000 bits of information per second.
That's awfully close to fitting inside a 900MHz signal (axe it to 12bit color, perhaps?).
I'm ignoring overhead and whatnot, but you could fit this amount of data in a 2.4GHz signal without too much of a sweat, it seems. This doesn't mean that you'll be able to run your 1600x1200x32 screen, but whatever.
Of course, IANATE (telecommunications engineer).
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?
Honestly, I'm far more interested in using Viewsonic's ViewPad -- they're billing it as a "super-PDA," but it's really just a nice tablet computer. 10" TFT screen, built in 802.11, and onboard storage.
Anyone tried getting Linux running on one of these yet? I'd love it for my house, but I'm not about to drop the 1100 dollars of the lowest price on Pricewatch just to try and get it running, and I don't know of any decent X servers for WinCE.
--saint
...enormous. What more is there to say?
"Never bullshit a bullshitter" All That Jazz
'nuff said.
460,800,000 bits of information means that your bandwidth needs to be 460 MHz wide. The frequency of the signal doesn't determine how much information can be carried, the bandwidth does. So a 10MHz wide signal at 900MHz is as good as a 10MHz wide signal at 2.4 GHz, bandwidth wise.
Now, there are better encoding schemes for things. A 640x480 screen size like NTSC fits in a 6MHz wide band, through careful use of ancient analog signal processing.
Of course, the way they are doing things, it looks like wireless ethernet and windows terminal server, which can work with a few hundred k or less per second and have room to spare.
Gentoo Sucks
Sheesh - just get one of these and a wireless card. Save yourself $100's. ..plus it runs Linux, use it as a wireless remote, mp3 player, etc..
"I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them." -Isaac Asimov
I can do that with an 802.11 card and a remote desktop client running on a slim tablet, terminal, laptop or whatever.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
well I knew about msnbc - and now this thing can run ms ce.net - not so sure I would want this. I mean cnet was boring enough, now they want me to carry it around with me? just because MS and cnet merged doent mean their programming will get any more entertaining.
SIMEDA Gmbh has a VNC viewer for the new Java-enabled phones (e.g. all new models from Nokia coming out this spring) and PDAs. True, not very speedy (goes over GPRS), but more "wireless" than something that needs to be within a few meters of the desktop computer. And at least VNC is open, so you can connect to Unix, Windows, Mac, whatever. All that from your cell phone.
Take a look here, Ford just announced that the latest line of the Ford Focus will be a wireless car! Yes, that's right you'll be able to take the car anywhere you want without having to worry about those annoying connector cables.
/. story on this one?
Where's the
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
... not to mention a one-to-one relationship with my computer.
Great! Here I was thinking we had an exclusive relationship all along.
Why is having a wireless monitor so hard to fathom? I'm watching a wireless "monitor" now in fact. Its called my television. Seems to get channels fine from "thin" air. These images are transmitted by a remote "base station".... they even have a high resolution model available in some places. I think that we have the tech but its not being looked at correctly. Just my thoughts.
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
- 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.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be useful, just that it's not quite what the headline says.
I wouldn't mind having a wireless tablet myself, I just haven't seen one at a realistic price. (Though I didn't try to see how much this one cost.)
Actually, TV is more along 300 lines I think. Not to mention it's analog.. you may wonder what the difference is, but the fact is that going from analog to digital requires at least 10x more bandwidth. It's simply because analog is much more noise-tolerant... your signal may be affected, but it doesn't result in catastrophic loss as it does in digital systems.
So fine, lets do the HDTV comparison. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about HDTV to know what the exact bandwidth numbers are. But if you want to put a multi-million powerful antenna in your house and pay the monstrous power bill to be able to use a wireless monitor, more power to you. Granted, you don't need the range, but you certainly need the same amount of bandwidth as an HDTV station. Not to mention your best resoultion would be (about?) 1080 x 600.
To address the compression concerns, you can use MPEG2 compression on "lifelike" pictures with little noticeable loss in quality, especially on regular definition TVs. Don't think for a second that applies to word processing where per-pixel resolution is practically a requirement.
So fine, lets make a compression scheme that is good on static scenes. What happens then when you want to play a 3D game?
There are already a few devices that can be powered by RF - eg. security and ID tags. How long before we can run our PDAs this way?
-- SIGFPE
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Yes, but then if you're drawing vector graphics on a monitor, its no longer a monitor.
First off, that is what this Viewsonic device is effectively doing, via a limited OS.
Secondly, analog TV has nowhere near the resolution of a 1024x768 computer monitor. Ever seen super-sharp 1/8" tall letters on your tv? No? oh, right, because its only got 300-odd scan lines. WIth the current generation of technology, wireless monitors are totally impractical. Besies, considering the cost of building a super-high-bandwidth limited range RF transciever vs the cost of a 25-pin cable, it'll almost never fly. Small, wireless tablet-pc's OTOH are kinda cool though... just expensive. Finally, the whole "assuming every pixel changes 60 times per seond thing" doesn't work. Lets say you're in windows/linux with gnome, doing work processing, so, lets say 1/100'th of your pixels change every second on average. Thats fine with good compression, and when you have a whole screen refresh it'll take a bit longer. But then you can't do games like quake, where everything changes every second. Remember, averages don't work in reality.
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
I saw this, and my first thought is it is perfect for the piano. It has audio already, so just plug in a mic and download some sheet music. With good software it should be able to tell where I am and automaticly turn pages. Put some speakers nearyby, and I can learn to play by ear from some tune, and after I give up on some hard section let the software give me sheet music for just that section. And it gives me a comptuer in the living room where I don't want a real one, but once in a while want to use one.
Note that piano software isn't exactly easy to write. Beginners make mistakes, while experts improvise, so it needs to allow very loose interpitations of where you are. Figguring out what notes are being played is also doable, but not easy. Probably more complex than a strongArm can do, but that is okay, I got a fast comptuer in the office to offload the hard work onto, just compress the audio and process it elsewhere)
Now if the cost is just reasonable
All I need to have is a few of these on my desk: "Damn it! Where did I put that desktop!?!?!?"
Really? I'm DROOLING with anticpation for full blown tablet PCs (this will do nicely) for when I'm doing the rounds. Need to reset somebody's password? Go for it! Talking to the manager of customer service, when one of the CSRs pops their head up over the cube walls and complains that the CRM system is really really slow? Check the database server load! No need to kick somebody off their keyboard for a minute, or sit down and pop open a laptop, or run to your desk, or server room. Wireless tablet quite nicely bridges desktop and laptop. Hell, I damn near tried to find an ePod and load up the WinCE terminal service client on it.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
If you want a dongle that plugs in to your video port and gives 800x600x60Hz video at 16 bits, that works out to 460 Mbits of bandwidth. So "Wireless Video" is somethere around "Wireless Gigabit Ethernet" in terms of feasibility. I don't even know if the FCC has a big enough chunk of bandwidth left that it hasn't sold.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
Please enlighten us. One Cable TV Channel, running 60, 30 frame/s? What resolution would you give the best Cable TV, anything like 800x600? I'm sure it requires a bit more than 6 MHz for a steady stream of 'worst case' frame to frame. His math is crude, but it's hardly worth dwelling on. You'd still like some kind of scrambling so the neighbors and spooks can't track what you're doing, right?
Power of a transmitter could be very low, but you'd want to be sure your OC'd CPU doesn't leak noise from your modded PC case and interfer, so a bit of extra power might be called for. When it comes down to it, you should probably be running at least in the GHz range. Maybe at that power and frequency you could nuke some houseflies...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What is the "RF Industry" anyway?
I have cable internet, but not cable TV..
My parents have satellite TV, I have an antenna.
Both my folks and I get our video signals over the air, and none of us have cancer or cooked intestines.. So I'm sceptical of your scepticism.
Further, I work in the "Power Generation Industry" as a software engineer.. And even though to do my job I need to know nothing about power generation itself, I'll tell you for a fact that electricity can also be transmitted over the air. If done properly, it's even quite harmless.
That said, this is just a web-tablet running something like VNC or Terminal Server. So, while this is not sending video over the air, it serves as though it did. So what's the difference?
As for the plausibility of transmitting video signals wirelessly.. Well, been to Radio Shack lately? How about the X-10 wireless video camera website?
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
You'd think that if you kept the distances small, you could get fairly high quality wireless monitors, with low RF emissions. (I'm mainly interested in a couple of feet, from the PC to the monitor, not hundreds of feet.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Well unless you're using a battery powered television, either you've invented wireless power or you're not using a wireless television ...
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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?
Video Resolution/Built-in LCD Display
800 x 600 in landscape mode
600 x 800 in portrait mode
Duh.
"Windows and Linux can co-exist on the same machine." - Microsoft Corporation.
Looks to me like more of a WinCE handheld, but a really large one at that. Maybe we've embarked on the armhelds?
How long til someone gets linux running on this I can VNC into everything I own?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Actually, TV is more along 300 lines I think.
:).
720x240 at 60 Hz, interlaced to give you 720x480 at 30 Hz, if I remember correctly. Some of the rows/columns aren't visible, though.
Just as a data point, since the exact values aren't terribly relevant
Not to mention it's analog.. you may wonder what the difference is, but the fact is that going from analog to digital requires at least 10x more bandwidth. It's simply because analog is much more noise-tolerant... your signal may be affected, but it doesn't result in catastrophic loss as it does in digital systems.
It turns out that this isn't quite correct, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, there's no reason to transmit the display signal digitally. We've all been using analog CRTs for years without a problem; digital is only required within the computer, where we want to be able to manipulate data without loss. Lossiness on the final output stage is tolerable.
Secondly, it turns out that you can transmit digital signals much more densely than you estimate. A factor of 10 is what I'd expect for one bit per sample plus a little bit of error correction. You can actually get much, much more than this (a 56k modem gets around 4-6 bits per sample, if memory serves). More aggressive error correction codes let you correct for a surprising amount of noise, too.
In short, I think you could do it with only about a factor of 2 bandwidth increase, especially over short range under controllable conditions.
Lastly, you have a vast amount of bandwidth available. If there's enough airspace to transmit 60+ channels of television at relatively low frequencies, finding a window for monitors shouldn't be an unsolvable problem.
Entrapment could be ever so easy: Look! He went to a child porno site!
Wasn't that you sitting outside my house breaking and entering my computer?
I was talking, not thinking. -D. Franz
Televisions blamed for emitting large doses of electromagnetic waves called "photons".
Film at 11
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
it still needs to be plugged in, in order for it to get power... dosn't that sort of defeat the wireless part of it...
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
This is the revival of a product released over 8 years ago, the Wyse Winterm 2930: a DOS/Pen based wireless Citrix winterm.
There was no RDP support of course because it hadn't even been envisioned by Microsoft at the time - in fact, Microsoft was having tremendous legal headaches involving software licensing on Citrix's special "multiple simeotaneous user" versions of Windows NT 3.1 and later 3.5. This culminated in the establishment of MS's internal "Hydra" project and the creation of Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition and the later integration of this "Terminal Services" software into as much as possible all the way down into the Windows XP Home edition.
Which is why this is now a viable product - Cheap touch panels, better batteries, and a larger market should make this product fly again - even if it is made by someone else.
A real wireless monitor -- now that would be something to see!
~GoRK
wireless pr0n in bed?
Agreed. It appears they've simply come up with another name for marketing a stripped down network pc.
>>It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF
>>bandwidth and/or power required to do it would >>either kill you, cook your intestines or give
>>you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you
>>implement it.
Ummmmmmm. ok - i'll bite.......
then how is DirectTV beaming 200 channels completely across north america without frying the entire population.....? How are the reglar TV stations in my area transmitting dozens of channels without killing me.
And i'd guess the power requirements for a 'wireless monitor' with a range of 50-100 feet would be a LOT less than a satellite 23,000 miles away (!) that has to deal with the atmosphere, rain fade, etc etc etc.
I know that this thing isn't a *real* wireless monitor (good job editors), but I have to question the statement that a real one would kill me when there are tons of RF transmissions around me every second pumping thru even more bandwidth.
Some sort of transform coding (eg DCT) or perhaps Huffman (if the overhead of the huffman tree is acceptable) I guess reducing to 25% of the original size should be doable, of course IANATEE (telecommunications engineer, either :)
If you really need to send the signal wirelessly, why not use MPEG and deal with the artifacts? HDTV is going to be compressed into 6(?, IANATCE either)MHz channels, so that's probably good enough for SVGA resolutions - you might use a 30Hz refresh to conserve bandwidth, which won't matter since your display is a pokey LCD anyway.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
And that doesn't account for automatic rate switching, interference, and other nodes on the network.
And most of all, it doesn't account for the fact that PC Anywhere and others have already been doing it for years with less than 56K.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I did that long time ago, with a laptop!
I think the person in charge of this stupid product should be fired. If someone knows his/her name, let's see how long he/she will stay on that position.
I bought one of these and cracked it open. Guess what I found inside? WIRES!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Would be a great idea, even better would be one in the *shower*.
This monitor and the similar one from Philips use WinCE & Citrix to do remote display. But what if I want to use Linux/VNC, Linux/Citrix or even my own code to display the user's sceen wirelessly?
:v)
Well, then my customers can't use Windows XP, because the EULA says you can't display the screen on anything but a Windows PC.
Anyone from the anti-trust suit listening? No, didn't think so.
Vik
I certainly hope this isn't true. If it is, I'll have to throw out my TV and rabbit ears!
Stupid like a fox!
I'll readily admit I'm an idiot in the RF arena, but I have a question. What about the 2.4GHz wireless transmitters that can send the signal from a TV to another TV/monitor? Surely they're not using that kind of bandwidth, are they? How is it done?
Not to mention the fact that TV's are fed by antennas. Is each channel taking up the equivalent bandwidth?
Yeah, so I'm going to establish a 1-1 relationship with my desktop PC by leaving my desk and accessing my desktop pc at crappy color depth over a low bandwidth network link using terminal server protocols and avoiding video and highly graphical apps?
Okay. Go bankrupt. See what I care.
So, anyway... This bucket of marketing droid spew makes me realise what I most hate about Macs [and now for something completely different] -- It's not really Macs (the kludgey pre-X OS has been mostly replaced, and the hardware isn't so overpriced anymore,) it's just Apple, and its "Reality Distortion Field(TM)" (as the Register calls it)...
Apple goes for really odd technical promotional ploys, like trying to hype the insignificantly (~10%-20%) better performance of their IO interconnect bus over PCland's northbridge/southbridge designs, when their processor bus (single clocked 133mhz) is so slow that they can't even go to DDR SDRAM, because they've already hit the bus bottleneck. (Compare with Athlon's double-pumped 133mhz bus, and Pentium 4's quad-pumped 133mhz bus.) Watch them try to promote their new G4 systems with DDR SDRAM L3 caches but half-speed PC133 ram against systems where the entire main memory is DDR SDRAM; see them try to sneak the "Well, their processors don't have L3 caches, so our platform must be faster." assertion under the radar. It's hilarious!
I'll avoid commenting on their facist intellectual property policy or their monopolistic microsoftian product tying practices. (Oops... Well, I can't take those adjectives back now...)
Anyway, this wouldn't really bother me so much if trade press hacks and clueless consumers didn't so often say that Apple was the most consumer-friendly thing since sliced bread all the time. User friendly? Sure. Consumer friendly? Caveat emptor.
I think the poster was talking about an actual wireless monitor, so the compression would have to be done in hardware; And building the amount of compression we're talking about here into the hardware isn't necessarily an easy solution to the latency problem ... it would be slow any way you look at it.
If you want to make it essentially a wireless graphical terminal (thus requiring a bunch of processing onboard, and reducing compatibility), there are a lot of tricks we can pull out of the hat. We could even go so far as to have video always decompressed on the far side of the connection. (That's non-trivial: we'd need to get a good collection of embedded processor video codecs going first...)