Panasonic president unveils 150-inch wireless 'life screen'

Tim Conneally, BetaNews: At a keynote speech here this morning at CES, Panasonic President Toshihiro Sakamoto showed the audience that his was definitely the biggest, and that he didn't need cables to hold it up. Specifically, he unveiled an 11-foot-long, 150-inch diagonal flat screen monitor he called the "life screen."

It's time to bring back family time, Sakamotosan said.

Scott Fulton, BetaNews: Tim, one might guess he meant a fairly large family with a pretty limitless budget.

12:20 pm ET Tim Conneally: It's a plasma screen with 2,000 by 4,000 digital resolution. But the highlight came when Sakamoto snipped a huge cluster of wires leading from a Blu-ray player to one of the displays, as a kind of ribbon-cutting ceremony for WirelessHD.

It's based on beam-steering technology, he said. In one demonstration, he placed a wireless camcorder on top of the "home base" unit, and it automatically brought up the content of the camera on the screen. This technology will be shown in detail at the Panasonic booth all this week, and availability is slated for next year.

12:42 pm ET Tim Conneally: Later, Sakamotosan demonstrated an alternative to WirelessHD, Panasonic's implementation of powerline home networking, which uses the AC wiring in houses.

And in one of the less well received demos by the crowd, the Panasonic president showed a prototype of a "lifewall" display that's touch-sensitive, and that's used as a tool for interacting directly with Blu-ray content.