A million-[insert currency] idea: For free!

geoschmo · #1 January 10th, 2007, 03:12 PM

This is an idea I've kicked around for a long time as well when I noticed that my laptop probably never gets's used more than about 50ft from one spot in the house. I'm kind of suprised not to have seen it done. There are wireless LCD TV's on the market where the TV tuner is in a base unit which beams the video signal to the battery-powered LCD screen. You could actually rig something up with one of those as a proof of concept. Just need a video card that hooks up to a TV video input. Add a bluetooth keyboard and your in business.

Maybe there is some technical reason you don't see wireless PC monitors? Would the amount of signal going through the video cable eat up too much bandwith to be done wirelessly and be practical. Have you ever noticed that the video cable is always much thicker and stiffer than the mouse and keyboard cable? There must be something different about the signal.

Lord_Shleepy · #2 January 10th, 2007, 04:51 PM

Quote:

geoschmo said:
This is an idea I've kicked around for a long time as well when I noticed that my laptop probably never gets's used more than about 50ft from one spot in the house. I'm kind of suprised not to have seen it done. There are wireless LCD TV's on the market where the TV tuner is in a base unit which beams the video signal to the battery-powered LCD screen. You could actually rig something up with one of those as a proof of concept. Just need a video card that hooks up to a TV video input. Add a bluetooth keyboard and your in business.

Maybe there is some technical reason you don't see wireless PC monitors? Would the amount of signal going through the video cable eat up too much bandwith to be done wirelessly and be practical. Have you ever noticed that the video cable is always much thicker and stiffer than the mouse and keyboard cable? There must be something different about the signal.

It's a great idea...but I have a feeling that geoschmo might be on to something. You would think that there would be a significant loss of performance if you take the wire out. Then again...who knows...marvels of modern technology and all...

Then there's always this: Build a desktop with a "convenient" carry handle and slightly longer than average cables then market it as "the amazing portable desktop!" and quietly disappear when the support line starts ringing.

Fyron · #3 January 10th, 2007, 07:12 PM

Streaming video is very bandwidth intensive. Wifi B can barely handle low resolution internet videos. Wifi G is a little better, and can usually stream 320x240 or 640x480 video files tolerably. I can't imagine it working well with high resolution video streaming, though. Any reasonable desktop resolution (1024xY or higher) might be too much for it to handle smoothly. Sending back input data doesn't use much bandwith, so that part probably isn't an issue.

Those small LCD screens probably have fairly low resolutions (compared to what you would want to run a computer at normally), which is why they can work with Wifi <N. When Wifi N becomes finalized, dumb Wifi consoles might become more practical.

Atrocities · #4 January 10th, 2007, 07:24 PM

Within the next couple of years you will see an entire industry crop up simular to that of the cell phone industry, where PC will all come equipped long range wireless capabilities and people will be able to subscribe to a wireless network and be able to connect no matter where they are. I know sprint is working on this system now.

As it stand most laptops have limited range with what they are built with now, you can plug a cell phone into them and get access over a cell phone network.

So the next logical step would be to have a dedicated independent broadband wireless network available for people who want to stay "wired" wherever they may be.

Hell I would love to see this service offered. Give up the DSL and go with a truly wireless and secure broadband ISP. This way I can sit at the beach and be able to go on line in the evening after a day of riding.

Will · #5 January 11th, 2007, 12:39 AM

Just to add some concrete numbers, streaming 1080i video will take about 1.5Gbit/sec bandwidth. That is currently beyond the capability of standard wireless technology. However, adding in a chip that can do hardware MPEG decoding should reduce the needed bandwidth to on the order of 300Mbit/sec. Which is still outside the range of the 54Mbit/sec of current standard wi-fi (802.11g), but is within reach for the draft 802.11n standard. As long as there is dedicated hardware encoding and decoding to prevent taxing the general CPUs, it should be do-able soon-ish.

Combat Wombat · #6 January 11th, 2007, 12:53 AM

Soon we will have USB 3.0 which will be a wireless standard that has the same transfer rates as USB 2.0 has over wires and is deisgned to work with stuf like this. I am afraid its planned range may not be enough for this.

Fyron · #7 January 11th, 2007, 02:59 AM

Can you provide us with a source for that info, CW?

frightlever · #8 January 17th, 2007, 05:39 PM

Can't you basically do this with a PDA running Remote Desktop Software to access your base PC?

Fyron · #9 January 17th, 2007, 05:49 PM

No. You can use remote desktop/vnc to access a PC from a laptop too, but neither one is a solution to the problem at hand. You can't do much with hardware video streaming over vnc/rd. They can display the slow rate software video layer fine (the windows desktop), but they have much trouble with high frame rates (such as video files and 3d games).