Samsung is apparently planning on revealing a television at CES 2013 that will take TVs to the next level: see through.

Yesterday, on the Samsung blog, the company showed a picture of a vertically sitting television.  In the picture is a landscape type background which you can see directly through the TV.  While Samsung didn’t give any details about the TV, it did a it did say  “A true innovation of TV design is coming up with an unprecedented new TV shape and timeless design”.

So the questions that will have to wait until next weeks Consumer Electronics Show are, is this tv going to attempt to convert TV to portrait viewing?  Is this truly a see through set, or are they just showing off the realism of the display?

Last year if we recall, Samsung did show off a transparent LCD panel  designed for store windows and kiosks, so this wouldn’t be that much of a stretch considering they did hint that a 46 inch version was in the works.

Check the picture, what is your opinion? If a see-through TV did exist, what practical implications does it have? Would you want one?

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New Samsung HDTVs UNES8000 LED and PNE8000 Plasma are really stunning pieces of rapidly evolving technology.  This time, it’s not just 55 inches of Super OLED goodness, or beautiful plasma screen on a second model, it’s these features bundled with both TVs, as per Samsung press release:

Consumers can use Samsung’s new Smart Interaction technology to easily manage their TV experience. By using Voice Control, Motion Control and Face Recognition features to complement the remote control, users can turn the TV on or off, adjust the volume or activate selected apps through speech. They can also use voice to activate the search function in the web browser and “tell” the TV what they are searching for.

The Super OLED’s built-in HD camera recognises movement in the foreground to enable intuitive control, and two unidirectional array microphones recognise voice at an incredibly accurate rate. Noise cancellation technology helps to separate any background noise from the user’s commands.

In other words, these TVs supposed not just watching you Big Brother style, they also listen to you carefully (that may mean selecting your voice out of ambient noise) and checking whether it is really you by face recognition feature.

However, one feature from Orwell’s “1984″ design guidelines for TVs is missing here: Samsung HDTVs presented may still have “Power OFF” button. I would suggest Samsung, for better Orwellian compliance, lose this button, together with the prohibited voice commands “Power OFF!”, “Shut OFF”, and the like.

Jokes aside, these “smart” TV features are still stunning. Face recognition for your kid can easily implement parental controls on content a kid is allowed to watch, or not to watch.

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Nuance Communications Inc. today unveiled Dragon TV, a unique voice and natural language understanding platform for TV, device and set-top box OEMs and service operators. Dragon TV is all about making today’s living room experience easier with voice controls and the ability to access shows, movies and content in a way that adds both appeal and a sense of enjoyment for the average consumer.

Nuance’s natural language understanding technologies allow consumers to say virtually anything to quickly and easily discover shows, movies and more. For instance, people can say:

• “Go to PBS”
• “What’s on Bravo at 9 p.m. tonight?”
• “When is Ellen on?”
• “Watch Dexter on DVR”
• “Find comedies with Vince Vaughn”
• “Play David Guetta on Music Choice”

The company Nuance Communications is dominant in the auto, mobile, and health care markets with its speech recognition, and speech-to-text technologies.

This breakthrough technology means that sometime in the not so distant future you might start talking to your Dragon TV enabled television without any Siri intervention: sure, Siri was first at grabbing customers attention, but Nuance can stake its hold on a plethora of its patents for understanding human speech.

Either way, with voice technologies starting to hit the living room the universal remote may soon be a thing of the past.

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This unofficial leak shows off the device itself, which is a 6-inch tablet, as well as a series of specs labeled on the retail box. From there, we can see that it uses Android 2.3 Gingerbread and comes with WiFi, a 4000mAh battery, and IR connectivity. The assumption is that it’ll play nice with Motorola cable boxes.

What’s interesting is that the UI on the TV appears to be mirrored on the tablet. This could mean that the tablet could serve as a “picture in picture” kind of controller too, allowing one program to be shown on the big screen and another program on the smaller screen. Maybe. We’re hearing that the Corvair is being tested with various cable providers at the moment.

Would you buy a dedicated Android remote for your TV and cable box? Or does this simply make more sense if they include it as an “app” on a Xoom tablet or Droid phone of some kind?

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