The next time VW tells you that they've thoroughly tested their cars, you should probably believe them.  They just spent $38 million on a new testing facility that can simulate the worst weather conditions imaginable in a booth large enough to fit a car.  The facility holds multiple cars at once in different booths that operate completely independently of each other.

The whole facility contains 50 separate modular booths, each large enough to hold one car.  Each booth can fully test a car twice a day.  Temperatures in the booth go as low as -40 degrees and as high as 302 degrees Fahrenheit, and humidity can be varied up to 95%.  The pictures are really quite interesting.

Researchers at MIT and Cambridge University have developed what could be a breakthrough in air transportation.  They have developed a passenger jet plane that sounds no louder than a washing machine from outside an airport, making it a whole lot quieter than the planes we have now.  The concept plane is about the size of a Boeing 767, but is shaped more like a B-2 bomber to make less noise.

This can mean a lot of different things.  Mostly, it means that airports can be placed closer to residential areas.  This lets us expand closer to airports, without any decrease in living quality for those around the airport.  The Silent Aircraft Initiative says that we probably won't have such a plane in existence until around 2030, so it'll be a while.

Cable Internet access seems to be getting better every day, but there has to be a limit sometime.  Not today: Broadlogic has unveiled a new processor called TeraPIX, which squeezes even more information into the same bandwidth of the coax cable running through your house.

The processor works by compressing the 80 existing analog channels into a much narrower digital band.  When the signals reach your house, they are reconverted back into an analog signal, so you don't notice a thing, but it gives you all that extra bandwidth for more digital programming, or, even better, more Internet bandwidth.  The chips are available now, in bulk pricing for $300 apiece, so hopefully they'll get a little cheaper.

The SHOJI will detect people's emotions and change color based on the overall mood it detects in the room of your choice, for those of us who can't do it on our own.  Developed by the University of Tokyo, the SHOJI has an LED flask-type thing which displays different colors for different moods: red for anger, blue for sadness, yellow for happiness, and green for peace.

The SHOJI monitors levels of light, temperature, humidity, infrared, and ultrasonic waves, along with the presence of people, their body temperature, and, somehow, the "nature of activity in the room."  Putting all this together, the flask displays the calculated mood of the room.  And if that wasn't enough to convince you...well, you're probably not going to buy it for around $3,000 when it's released in Japan in April.

Blu-ray and HD-DVD have been suffering a bit recently, as a shortage of the diodes needed to power the optical pickup component has left everyone unable to meet their projected launch numbers.  Perhaps the PlayStation 3 has suffered the most, with no units available in Europe at launch and only a measly 480,000 in Japan and the US combined, and even the 400,000 the US is getting seem questionable.

Shimei Semiconductor seems to have a possible way out of this mess.  It seems there's a way to make the laser diodes using a silicon wafer, as opposed to the current process, which uses sapphire to make the diodes.  They estimate that the new laser diodes will be not only cheaper and easier to make in large quantities, but they'll last longer too.  Sounds too good to be true, but that's how technology usually goes.

The estimate is that these new diodes will be available in April, so they're not going to speed up the launch of PS3 in Europe.  Still, we can hope to see cheaper and more reliable Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives in the future.

No matter how far technology has progressed, the wires behind our home theater systems are just as annoying as they were 5 years ago.  But now Sony, Samsung, and LG, along with Toshiba, Panasonic, NEC, and SiBEAM are working on a new wireless spec called WirelessHD (or WiHD) that will let you transfer uncompressed HD content wirelessly between different audio and video components.

Using the 60GHz frequency, WiHD will transfer both video and audio, and the technology should be integrated in a variety of components, TVs, game consoles, and other accessories by spring of 2008.  And, for devices that don't have WiHD built-in, there will be adapters available that allow it to work with other WiHD-enabled devices.

Blu-ray has really been taking a hit recently.  Pioneer has announced that their BDP-HD1 player will be delayed until December.  Pioneer said that the BDP-HD1 "has not passed the company's quality control requirements, and it will be available when it does."  Originally it was supposed to be released in May, then it was delayed to October, and now that October has passed, the new expected date is sometime in December.

When released, the BDP-HD1 is expected to cost $1,500.

Well, it's definitely been quite a while since the last version of Windows Media Player.  But WMP 11 is finally here, and the final version is available now for all (genuine) versions of Windows XP.

The new version has a host of new features, most notably a new online music service called URGE, a joint project with MTV to maybe provide competition to other leading online music stores.  The URGE service currently has over 2 million songs and is improving every day.

Other features of WMP 11 include a new visual interface that makes albums look like real albums (a feature that iTunes 7 was quick to integrate, making their own version of it before WMP left the beta stage), easier navigation, a bigger online experience, new audio formats for ripping, and an industry-first capability to recognize track information from audio files with no identification.

 

It seems Europe will be seeing yet another major delay in new entertainment items.  Recently Microsoft announced that the Zune player won’t be available in Europe for a long time.  Even though it will be released in the United States on November 14, customers in Europe won’t see it until late in 2007, possibly even later.

You have to wonder why there would be such a huge delay between the two launches.  The most probably explanation is just that there is no infrastructure for a real Zune release.  For example, Microsoft doesn’t seem to have any solid idea of how it will distribute online music for the Zune outside of the United States.  But obviously the hardware itself will be ready, so it’s really a question of the other things that have to be there when the Zune is released.