TI’s OMAP 4 Platform Enables 3D, Gesture Control, Running Two OSes at Once

Though Nvidia’s quad-core Kal-El platform was all the rage at Mobile World Congress this year, Texas Instruments made a huge splash showing off all the capabilities of its OMAP 4 chip. At its booth, TI showcased its platform’s ability to power 3D devices, enable all kinds of gesture control, provide DRM support, and even run dual operating systems simultaneously.

Gesture Control

Microsoft’s Kinect is all the rage among console gamers while numerous notebooks, including the Sony VAIO series, have their own forms of gesture control. However, Texas Instruments is the first company we’ve seen to demonstrate gesture control on a phone, and it doesn’t end there.

At its booth, TI showed how OMAP 4 can support both short and long-range gesture control. In short-range situations, individual users can stand in front of their phones using hand motions to navigate through, for example, a photo gallery. In long-range use, an OMAP 4 powered set-top box could use facial recognition to ensure that it follows the gestures of only one user rather than having different members of the family compete for control.

Running Dual Operating Systems at the Same Time

At its booth, Texas Instruments showed how a single OMAP 4 processor is powerful enough run two different operating systems at the same time. In the demo, the same system played a 1080p video in Android on a small screen while simultaneously surfing the web in Ubuntu Linux on a larger monitor.

3D: Both With and Without Glasses

TI’s OMAP 4 platform powers the LG Optimus 3D, the first smart phone in the world to offer glasses free, stereoscopic 3D graphics. While these glasses-free images didn’t seem to have the depth of we’d seen in Toshiba’s glasses-free notebook display, OMAP 4 also outputs high-quality 3D signals over HDMI. We had a chance to view a game of Splinter Cell on a large monitor that was being played on an OMAP 4 chip and were impressed with the sharp images popping off the screen.

DRM Support

As we showed in a previous post, TI’s OMAP 4 is capable of meeting Neflix’s stringent DRM requirements. This also opens up a whole new world of possibilities for protected content.