LOS ANGELES -- Majesco Entertainment is still weighing its plans for stereoscopic 3D console videogames after releasing Attack of the Movies 3D in the spring for the Wii, Director of Marketing Liz Buckley told Consumer Electronics Daily at E3 last week. For now, the third-party game maker is focusing its 3D efforts on games for the coming Nintendo 3DS, she said.
With states continuing to develop disparate e-waste programs, it’s going to be very difficult for industry to “work our way out of this complicated patchwork,” said Walter Alcorn, who took over the top environmental affairs job at CEA in May. States are building e-waste programs with “their own registration fees and their own registration systems,” he said, and “the way things are rolling out they are making it difficult for manufacturers to implement collection and recycling systems across state lines.”
Monster Cable used the CEA Line Shows conference in New York Tuesday to unveil a universal 3D glasses system that it said will work with any 3D TV. The $249 one-size-fits-all solution bundles a pair of glasses and an emitter and will ship to dealers in August, the company said.
Children in Southern Africa could soon benefit from the U.K.’s plan to switch off mainstream terrestrial analog radio by 2015 and replace it with the European DAB terrestrial digital system. Over the last month, a “Radio Amnesty” promotion from the trade group Digital Radio U.K. (DRUK) has promised listeners a discount of 10 percent toward the purchase of a new DAB radio if they trade in their existing analog sets. The traded-in radios will then be sent to Southern African villages and hospitals by the U.S.-based charity, the Children’s Radio Foundation. But a question mark hangs over the ongoing provision of batteries needed to listen.
Vizio will field active-shutter and passive polarized 3D TVs as a hedge against a market where a 3D system hasn’t emerged yet as a clear-cut winner, Vice President Ken Lowe told us Tuesday at CEA LineShows in New York. The 65-inch passive 3D LCD TV will ship late this year at $3,000-$3,500 as the first in what’s expected to be a line of sets, Lowe said. The TV uses an AU Optronics 1080p panel, though the 3D resolution will likely be lower because of the polarized film applied to the screen. The polarized film adds about $200 to the cost of the set, Vizio officials said. The passive 3D TVs will be packaged with Sensio glasses that sell separately for about $30, Vizio officials said.
The CE industry will face a “delicate handoff” in the third quarter when consumers’ spending dollars move from stimulus-based to private-sector-based, said Shaun DuBravac, CEA chief economist and director of research, at the CEA Line Shows conference in New York Tuesday.
LOS ANGELES -- Paris game developer DarkWorks plans to ship sturdier, plastic 3D glasses at $20 a pair “by the end of this year” for titles that use the TriOviz technology it licensed that allows 3D content to be viewed on existing 2D TVs as well as any 3D TV, DarkWorks said at E3 here last week. The technology was demonstrated using the Epic Games-developed Gears of War 2, a title that wasn’t released in 3D, at E3, behind closed doors in the booths of Epic and DarkWorks.
The reason some Americans don’t or won’t subscribe to broadband has nothing to do with FCC policies, Phoenix Center Chief Economist George Ford said Monday during a debate sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Some don’t subscribe because they don’t want broadband in their homes, Ford said. Others can’t because of costs.
LOS ANGELES -- Stereoscopic 3D gaming could give accessories maker Mad Catz Interactive “an opportunity,” CEO Darren Richardson told Consumer Electronics Daily at E3 last week. The company may try to supply 3D glasses, “depending on how that whole market opens up,” and which 3D technology emerges as the dominant one in the home, he said.
As Paul’s TV expands a store-within-a-store format with furniture retailers, it has run into a roadblock in Michigan. The dealer launched the concept in 2008 at five-store Living Spaces Furniture in the Los Angeles area and added four-store Jordan’s Furniture in Massachusetts last year. But a similar agreement with 30-store Art Van Furniture brought conflict with ABC Warehouse, which shares many strip malls with the furniture dealer.