While the monstrous television pictured above won’t be available for this Sunday’s Super Bowl, Vizio has announced that it will be available this March for the bargain-basement price of just $3,499. While you dream up ways to convince your significant other that you absolutely need to upgrade the family television, take a look at some of the specs to whet your whistle.

Announced at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, the Visio CinemaWide television is just a hair under 5-feet wide while being a svelte 1.8 inches deep. It weighs 66 pounds with its stand, 56 without it… if you are planning on mounting it to a wall. The set offers passive 3D and includes four pairs of glasses, as well as five HDMI inputs so you can connect all your digital toys to the device. For connectivity the CinemaWide offers both WiFi and Bluetooth, which both tie into its smart options.

With a 21:9 resolution, you can kiss those annoying black bars goodbye as the television is built to display media in that resolution perfectly. For content that is in the 16:9 widescreen ratio, it can either be upsized to fit the screen, or you can place Twitter and Facebook widgets to fill up the screen. To interact with the aforementioned social media sites, you can make use of the bundled Bluetooth remote keyboard to make sharing your life easier.

Pre-orders for the television will begin soon, and Vizio has said that it will also release 50 and 71-inch sets in the near future. Can you imagine having 71-inches of awesomeness in your living room? Make sure that sucker will fit before you buy!

Read more at the Vizio site via The Verge

Starting to get excited for the Super Bowl on Sunday? Well, if you’re the type of person that prefers frame rates to field goals, CMOS sensors to cornerbacks, and recording times to rushing yards (I’m running out of sports terms…) then here is a fun fact about the Super Bowl XLVI: it will be filmed, in part, by four new NAC Hi-Motion II slow motion cameras.

The Hi-Motion II might look like what you expect a typical HD broadcast camera to be, but it has some serious tech packed inside. That includes three CMOS sensors, 96GB of storage, and the ability to record from 24 to 1000 frames per seconds, with controls that allow for 1 fps increments between those rates. The camera records at 1080 60i (what NBC will use this year) or 50i as well as 720p. And for the operator’s benefit it is outfitted with a 9-inch viewfinder that is used for tracking the event.

The Hi-Motion II might be capable of recording up to 1000 frames per second, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a) it can do so for any reasonable length of time, b) it can do so at Super Bowl, or broadcast, quality and c) it can record at the resolution necessary for television use. Scaling down the frame rate helps with this — NAC literature mentions that the camera’s recording time at “300fps Full Mode” is 38 seconds. That’s more than enough for a football play and assuming “Full Mode” means reasonable video quality these cameras should be a big hit on Sunday. The CMOS sensors they use are high sensitivity so the degradation and loss of light that comes with high frame rates should be minimized.

In a release the company noted that the camera is capable of “10X high speed images in Full HD” which isn’t very specific. NAC representative Andy Hayford told me that for the Super Bowl the Hi-Motion II cameras will in fact operate at 300 frames per second, which “works well on football, allowing replays of a usable duration in the match coverage but also showing so much more detail than a regular replay.”

According to a statement by NAC, the technical rehearsals have gone swimmingly. Above you can see Hayford at Lucas Oil Stadium during the pre-game testing.

As an added perk the Hi-Motion II can do simultaneous output of a live video feed and slow motion replay. So slow motion will be available without an interruption to the action that is ongoing.

Wondering what other gear is recording the Super Bowl this year? NAC told us that “The four NAC Hi-Motion II cameras are the only Ultramotion cameras, [but] there are a multitude of other normal speed cameras and Super-Slo-Mo (triple speed) cameras.” We’re told that in addition the to four Hi-Motion IIs NBC will have 40 match cameras recording the game.

Sometimes the smallest things are what annoys you the most. Take earbuds: after untangling them, you will typically have to search for the tiny “R” and “L” to indicate which belongs in which ear. It isn’t a monumental problem, but it’s enough of an inconvenience that a solution would be welcomed.

Scientists and engineers at a Japanese research program (ERATO) have pioneered a technology that can be that solution. It’s so simple that it’s amazing that nobody thought of it already. Simply add a proximity sensor to one of the earpieces, and let it determine which stream of stereo audio comes in.

Proximity sensors tell your smartphone’s screen to turn off when you are talking on it. It does this by emitting an electromagnetic field or infrared beam, looking for changes in the return signal.

In the case of the prototype headphones, the sensor is only placed in one ear. It would simply “look for” a nearby ear, and respond with the appropriate stereo feed. If it senses an ear (facing right), it transmits the left feed; if it doesn’t sense an ear (facing out), it transmits the right feed.

Additionally, the researchers claim that their headphones can detect if two people are sharing headphones. In this scenario, it would adjust the feed to transmit a combined mono feed to each ear, so nobody misses out on any audio delights. It isn’t explained how the headphones would know this, but many canoodling teenage couples would undoubtedly appreciate this perk.

Adding a proximity sensor may add some cost to the relatively cheap and simple design of most headphones and earbuds, but it shouldn’t be significant. Manufacturers should be able to add them for merely a few extra dollars in headphones’ bills of materials. That is, if somebody doesn’t patent this and start charging sky-high licensing fees for any manufacturer to use it.

You can see more from ERATO in the video below (narrated by Siri’s long-lost brother):

IGARASHI, via Engadget