----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE NUON CES 2001 NOTES
source: NUON Interactive Board
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
VM Labs had several presences at CES:
(1) Five or size kiosks were located in the main hall showing interactive
DVDs and games.
(2) Samsung had four N501 players in their booth. A VM Labs employee was
answering questions both times I walked through.
(3) Motorola had a Toshiba DVD player showing the games content as well as
1 Streamaster 5000 system.
(4) VM Labs had a main suite on the second floor divided into a public and
private area. The public area contained 9 or 10 players.
VM Labs Suite
The players in the suite included:
- Toshiba player showing a Galaxy Quest NUON Enchanced DVD
- A Samsung N501 showing movies or the VLM
- A Oritron player showing the VLM
- A Black reference design kit. This is a new revision of the board.
Sheets containing information on the architecture were also available for
the first time. The silicon product brief is suppose to be on the Samsung
site.
- A Streamaster 5000 system showing online games and multicast IP video.
- Mix of Toshiba, Samsung Extiva, and Reference Kits showing Merlin Racing,
Tempest 3000, Ballistic, and Iron Soldier (not yet finished).
Other things of interested included a stand of HPI products and the first
Logitech controllers. The logitech controllers are made for much larger
hands than the N64/Stealth controllers.
A sign on the wall also noted that VM Labs is working with a company to
train the sales forces of retail stores. In the future the sales people
might actually know something about the players.
A display also showed a picture of the development tools. These include a
content authoring suite for DVD authors, compiler, graphics source code
debugger, and a voicing tool.
Samsung N501
Sorry early Extiva adopters. Samsung has made significant improvements to
their new player. The UI is slick. Video is scaled an wrapped with a very
nice menu system that allow very easy control of the system. The VLM inter-
face is much improved and now sports 152 effects. Yak has out done himself
on the new effects. Additional options include gain control and switching
of beat reponse algorithms. In addition the new player has a much more
advance dual laser drive that can read CD-R and CD-RW discs. Reviewing this
group the best feature is MP3 playback.
Oritron
Who the hell is Oritron. One asked the same question when one first saw the
player in stores before Christmas (not a NUON player). Oritron is Korean
company that sells ~$100 players for very small profit margins. One believes
you can find their players in Target, WalMart, K-Mart, ...
Streamaster 5000
The Motorola Streamaster 5000 was announced on January 3. Announcements of
DSL deployments include Aliant (Canada), Blockbuster (Seattle, Salt Lake
City, and Portland), and Transact (Australia). The Motorolan representatives
said that additional deployments will be announced in the next 30-60 days.
Iron Soldier
Iron Soldier was being shown on the Streamaster 5000 and a Toshiba player.
The Streamaster version was fairly old. However, this allowed me to compare
it to the newer version on the DVD player. The dynamic lighting, exposions,
and game speed have been drastically improved. Your robot now moves at much
faster speeds and can stomp on buildings. Missions were not yet implemented
on the DVD version.
NUON Architecture
NUON is a VLIW processor with 5 processing elements and three busses.
A tech sheet is to come.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
