CEATEC Roundup: Sony's 0.3mm OLED display, Sharp's solar-power TV, Panasonic's LifeWall concept

While we all wait around until January for the Consumer Electronics Show, an event like CEATEC Japan can give us a taste of the future for home theater. And since ZDNet didn't offer to fly me over there to check it out first-hand (cough, next year, cough), I had to do the next best thing: Scour the Internet for the coolest technologies other folks got to stand in front of and drool over. Here's a roundup of the things I found most interesting from this trade show.

Anorexic Displays At a certain point, it doesn't really matter how thin a TV is, because you're watching the front of it, not checking out the side of it, especially if it's already hung on the wall. But the idea of ever-thinner displays still intrigues us, though I won't really be excited until the day you could just stick a self-adhesive TV on the wall. Nonetheless, the waif-ish trend in display design continues, with Sharp unveiling its Aquos X-series LCD TVs with bezels a mere 22.8mm thick, Hitachi showing off 35mm plasmas and 15mm LCDs, and Sony topping them both with an 11.1-inch OLED display that's a mere 0.3mm thick.

3D: Yesterday's Tomorrow Technology Today I had to suffer through that Miley Cyrus concert movie filmed in 3D (a sacrifice nobody warned me about before I became a parent), and I still can't believe that 3D is becoming a hot trend again. And yet, everyone's working on the ultimate way to display that elusive third dimension. Panasonic demoed 1080p HD content that used modified monitors to create the illusion of depth, but that requires special glasses (which always doomed 3D), whereas JVC previewed a giant (72-inch) 1080p prototype display that simulates 3D without the need for extra eyeware. In case you missed those awkward spectacles, JVC also showed off a new set of glasses that convert 2D video into 3D.

Tomorrow's New Technology?

3D may be a blast from the past, but there were a couple of new far-out ideas that could eventually land in your living room. Panasonic has gone Jetsons (or 1984) with its new LifeWall concept, which combines displays, home automation, and Big Brother to adjust the size of video on the wall as you move closer or farther away, let the wall follow you if you move away, and allow you to manipulate images through gestures a la Minority Report. If just the thought of the amount of power such a wall would use sends your head spinning, Sharp's new solar-powered TV concept (pictured) may be more appealing. Apparently, the included solar panel (you would presumably place on your roof) would provide just the amount of power (220kWh) needed to run the 52-inch LED-backlit HDTV it would be linked to. Perhaps not the most practical solution to TVs' power-hungry ways, but it sounds like something Ed Begley Jr. would spring for.

(Entrance sign photo credit: CEATAC Japan)