Canadians show off high-tech in Vegas

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This article was published 21/01/2006 (7423 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FROM digital parlour games to night-vision nanny spy cams, Canadian products made their mark earlier this month at North America’s largest trade show for home and personal gadgetry, the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The annual show offers a first look at the niftiest tech toys due in North American stores as early as this year. A record-setting 2,500 exhibitors and 130,000 industry executives, analysts and journalists were at the show, where heavy hitters from Microsoft to Google, HP and Intel, pitched their vision for an industry worth $126 billion US in annual global sales.

For Canadian companies, it’s both a launch pad for new products and an opportunity to keep an eye on the competition.

“This is a huge opportunity for us to go and say, ‘we have something that’s different and unique to the gaming business’,” said Jeff Hurst, vice-president of sales and marketing for ZAP It Games, a two-year-old game company based in Mississauga, Ont.

ZAP It’s Game Wave (www.zapitgames.com) is a digital reinvention of the 20th century-style parlour game. Instead of the traditional board with game pieces and dice, players each grab one of four handheld video remote controls and answer a series of trivia questions from a digital console hooked up to a standard DVD player. Trivia clues are displayed onscreen, with music and video clips.

* From Splitfish Gameware Inc. (www.splitfish.com), a two-year-old Edmonton company, come two intriguing video game accessories.

The first is the Dual FX, an L-type, laser-guided joystick due to launch North America-wide at the end of January, which points a built-in laser pointer on screen to shoot at characters or move them around the game.

It’s described as “a much cooler (video gaming) experience for the kids, but every mother’s nightmare, I hate to say,” said Splitfish CEO Cisco Schipperheijn.

In December, the company launched a Stereoscopic 3D adapter for the Sony PlayStation 2, which converts any two-dimensional game into 3D. The adapter’s patented innards essentially recreate game play on the fly in much higher-quality 3D than competitors, Schipperheijn said.

* Canadian technology is also ending up inside the guts of the latest digital devices.

Extreme USB by the tiny B.C. firm Icron Technologies Corp. (www.icron.com) of Burnaby is a technology that extends the range of a normal wireless device beyond the standard desktop range of five metres to more than 100 metres.

It also shifts huge amounts of digital data wirelessly between different portable devices, at the speedy rate of 450 megabits per second — light years ahead of Bluetooth, which can transfer data at the rate of under a megabit per second.

Extreme USB is being inserted into a pen-shaped flash drive called The Wireless USB, by Freescale Semiconductor, due for launch sometime this winter, which promises to eliminate the mass of cables in a home office or entertainment room.

“You could have computer on one side of room and put your hard drive, scanner, fax and printer in a locked drawer,” said Robert Eisses, vice-president of sales and marketing for Icron. “You’ve got rid of the clutter behind your desktop.”

Toronto-based ViXS Systems Inc.’s video processor chip turns any home computer into a multimedia portal with TIVO-like personal video recording capability.

One of the coolest new products the chip has been integrated into is Sony’s LF-PK1 “LocationFree” system, launched late last year, which plays television or prerecorded programs remotely and wirelessly from any location in the world.

Customers tap into their home entertainment network from any PlayStation Portable, Sony laptop computer or portable flat panel display screen.

“You could be a travelling with your laptop in Tokyo, and connect back through the Internet to watch your favourite episode of Law & Order,” said Ciricia Proulx, director of marketing for the four-year-old Toronto chip designer.

— CanWest News Service