Compaq Computer Corp says it wants to push the evolution of home personal computer technology further forward, and at the end of last week announced a joint initiative with Intel Corp and a set of other firms to establish what it calls a new category of products for the home. PC Theater, it says, merges computing and traditional forms of media and entertainment content on large screen displays, including television viewing capabilities, surround sound audio, digital video disk movies, wireless keyboards and mice, and Web browsing. They should also have the capacity to integrate telephony and phone messaging, programmable control of consumer devices such as video cassette recorders and CD jukeboxes, 3D graphics and multi-player games. As ever, the difficulty is getting all of these elements to work together, so the two, along with Thomson Consumer Electronics, Hitachi Ltd, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, NEC Technologies Inc, Philips Electronics NV and Toshiba Corp, plan to work together on plug-and-play standards, and will work with committees of the Video Electronics Standards Association in order to hammer out a final open interoperability standard.
