Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. has set up a new research center devoted to display and touch technologies in Japan that could end up hiring staff away from Sharp.

The new center, called Foxconn Japan RD Co., represents a major investment for Hon Hai and aims to recruit top talent from the country, the company said in Friday statement. The center will work in tandem with the company’s existing R&D resources in China and Taiwan to further improve its screen technology.

The initial facility will be based in the Japanese cities of Sakai and New Yokohama, but Hon Hai could expand the research center to other areas in the future. Leading the center is Kouzoh Yano, who’s been listed as a general manager with Sharp, and an expert in LCD technology, according to Hon Hai. It’s unclear if Yano is still employed with Sharp.

Hon Hai said it recruited Kouzoh Yano, the former general manager of a Japanese Sharp factory and LCD expert, to lead the center. The Japanese government recognized his role in leading a team that helped designed one of Sharp's most advanced factories. Sharp declined to comment on Yano's new positio

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Just in time for the Windows 8.1 debut and its hinted-at 4K resolution support, Asus is announcing a professional-grade (read: not cheap) Ultra HD LCD monitor.

The company will show the PQ321 Ultra HD, a 31.5-inch 4K Ultra HD monitor featuring a maximum resolution of 3840 by 2160 at Computex in Taipei, which starts Tuesday. The unit has a 16:9 aspect ratio, 176-degreee wide viewing angle, DisplayPort, dual HDMI inputs, and built-in 2W stereo speakers.

[RELATED: Three-Minute Tech: 4K resolution]

More pixels (per inch)

Asus said it used Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) for the active layer of the PQ321’s LCD panel instead of the standard amorphous silicon for LCD displays. Because IGZO panels can work with smaller transistors, Asus could cram smaller pixels onto the screen. That’s a good thing considering this panel has four times as many pixels as a standard 1080p monitor.

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Japan’s public television broadcaster, NHK, is working on technology that will allow people to watch TV with their fingers.

NHK is developing a system that maps objects shown on the TV screen in 3D space. “Viewers” place their index finger in a device connected to several actuators that provide haptic feedback, allowing surfaces, bumps and corners to be explored through touch.

The broadcaster demonstrated the technology as part of an open house at its research lab in Tokyo.

The next genration of TV watching

NHK is also working on a new platform for interactive TV, where viewers use tablets and smartphones to make comments about live shows, which are then shared and appear on ‘the TVs of their social contacts. One demonstration allowed users to tag specific locations on screen with comments, while another let viewers upload hand drawn pictures as part of a children’s show.

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Retina who? Not to be outdone on the display front, Samsung is showing off a 13.3-inch LCD notebook panel with a whopping 3200-by-1800 resolution screen.

Samsung Display will showcase the high-resolution screen during Display Week 2013 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Samsung's panel has a pixel density of 276 pixels per inch. If Samsung or other PC makers bring this display to market, it would easily outshine Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina Display (227 ppi), Toshiba's Kirabook (221 ppi), and Google's Chromebook Pixel (239 ppi).

But that's a big “if” in the near term, considering that Samsung hasn't actually announced any products that use the display. Last August, the company showed off a prototype 13.3-inch laptop with a 2560-by-1440 resolution panel (pictured above), but that hasn't come to market yet, either.

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Japan's Sharp booked another huge loss on Tuesday, and unveiled its latest turnaround plan, which includes relying on partnerships with Samsung Electronics and Foxconn Technology Group for business, sacking top management, and expanding into new fields such as robotics.

Osaka-based Sharp, one of the world's largest LCD screen makers but struggling under massive debt and unused capacity, said its losses for the year ended March 31 reached ¥545 billion ($5.4 billion), the largest in the company's history. Sharp promised its ongoing restructuring, involving thousands of job cuts and factory closings, will finally bear fruit this year in the form of a modest ¥5 billion profit.

The company said it will rebuild its tattered finances on products like laptop screens with the industry's highest pixel density at up to 262 pixels per inch, which it is to mass produce from June. The company has already found a customer for the screens in Samsung, according to local media reports. In March, Sharp secured a $110 million investment from Samsung and locked in the South Korean company as a long-term client.

Sharp said its turnaround will also include increasing income in its core LCD screen business to over $1 trillion in the year through March 2016. The company owns some of the largest factories in the world but has struggled with price falls and generating enough business to operate its lines. A deal signed with Foxconn last year gave that firm half control of one of Sharp's main LCD factories in return for a cash infusion and a steady stream of business.

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Be sad, fellow geeks, for we are witnessing the slow death of a staunch companion.

Between the proliferation of Retina displays, ultrahigh-resolution smartphone screens, überexpensive 4K televisions, and the ironically named Chromebook Pixel, eye candy has never been so abundantly available, nor so abundantly delicious. Screens are saturated with millions—millions—of tiny little squares, rendering images and text alike in buttery-smooth fidelity.

The jagged edges of yesteryear are bleeding away. On-screen images are looking more and more like continuous-tone photographs. The pixel as we know it is all but dead.

Children of the future will look back at games like E.T. and Doom, and rather than waxing nostalgic, they'll shake their heads at how utterly bad we used to have it. (Dot-matrix printers? Please.) Resolution specs will eventually fade into the annals of history, as all screens will look equally splendid. And you'll never, ever find a dead pixel on a new display—because even if it's there, you won't be able to notice it.

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A former executive with AU Optronics was sentenced Monday to serve two years in prison and pay a $50,000 fine for participating in a worldwide LCD screen price-fixing conspiracy, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Shiu Lung Leung, former senior manager of AU Optronics' desktop display business group, was sentenced for price fixing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

AU Optronics, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan, and its U.S. subsidiary, AU Optronics America, headquartered in Milpitas, California, were found guilty in March 2012, for participating in the thin-film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) price-fixing conspiracy, after an eight-week trial. Also found guilty were former AU Optronics President Hsuan Bin Chen and former AU Optronics Executive Vice President Hui Hsiung.

A trial for Leung then ended in a mistrial. Monday's sentencing followed a three-week retrial that started in November and resulted in Leung's conviction. Leung's lawyer wasn't immediately available for comment on the sentencing.

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Intel has doubled the speed of the Thunderbolt data transfer technology, which will soon shuttle data between host computers like Macs and peripherals at a rate of 20 gbps (gigabits per second).

This is the first big speed boost for the interconnect, which has held steady at a 10 gbps data transfer rate since the technology’s introduction in early 2011.

The enhancement will give Thunderbolt an edge over USB 3.0, which transfers data at 5 gbps. However, Thunderbolt so far has been poorly adopted by makers of peripherals, PCs and other devices.

The improvement could set the stage for Macs to support 4K displays, whose resolution of 3840 by 2160 pixels is four times today’s standard high-definition resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. Thunderbolt ports are available in a few PCs from Acer, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and Dell.

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An electronics and a recycling trade group are looking for ways to reuse recycled cathode ray tube (CRT) glass from computer monitors and television sets, with a $10,000 prize for the best proposal.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) launched the CRT Challenge Monday, with the two groups looking for financially viable, environmentally conscious proposals for using recycled CRT glass. The challenge is hosted on crowd-sourced incentive site Innocentive.com.

CRT technology has been replaced in the monitor market by liquid crystal displays (LCDs), light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and plasma displays, but the trade groups expect more than 2 billion pounds of legacy CRT TVs and monitors to enter the recycling stream in the coming years.

CEA and ISRI will accept submissions for the CRT Challenge until June 30. The groups will pick the winning proposal based on economic and environmental benefits, and CEA will award $10,000 to the winner. CEA and ISRI will publicize and share proposals with manufacturers, retailers and recyclers.

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Moore's law may keep us supplied with octa-core smartphone processors and PCs packed with millions of transistors, but not all areas of technology keep the pedal to the proverbial metal as enthusiastically as the chip technology. Specifically, desktop displays—the portals through which we glimpse the output of those hulking CPUs—are stuck in neutral while the technology in the rest of your PC tears ahead at breakneck speed.

Sure, Retina-level displays look mighty fine, but c'mon. This is the 21st century, not 1999. Fortunately, several forward-thinking ventures are ditching traditional PC flat screens in favor of innovative designs that could one day redefine the way we look at our computers. These, folks, are the PC displays of the future—or at least they aim to be.

Oculus Rift

Any discussion about PC displays of the future would be incomplete if it didn't mention virtual reality, and the virtual reality kit that has gained the most notoriety lately is the Kickstarter-backed Oculus Rift. This headset has captured the attention of gaming enthusiasts en masse. Powered by a sensor package that includes a gyrometer, an accelerometer, and a magnetometer, the Oculus Rift uses the data generated by those components to monitor your head movements and translate them into 3D gaming worlds with virtually no latency, giving you a truly immersive VR experience.

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Monitor shipments will continue to sink in 2013. But when consumers do buy a monitor, they’ll turn to larger screens—31-inches or more in size.

Weak monitor demand during the last quarter of 2012 has prompted market research firm IDC to revise its shipment estimates for that period, as well as those for this year.

However, IDC, whose parent company also owns PCWorld, identified two bright spots in a market being hurt by the declining popularity of desktop PCs.

“While the monitor market continues to contract, we do expect a refresh from expiring Windows XP operating system licenses in 2014 and growing demand from developing regions like Middle East and Africa to help increase monitor shipments and soften the decline,” IDC said in its report.

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Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group said it was still negotiating a deal for greater cooperation with Sharp, despite the Japanese display maker securing a $110 million investment to supply LCD panels to rival Samsung Electronics.

Sharp's agreement with Samsung was no surprise to Foxconn, which had received prior notification of it, said the company's parent Hon Hai Precision Industry in a statement on Wednesday. "We thank Sharp for treating our bilateral relations with respect," it added.

The company declined to comment on the Samsung deal itself, but said talks to deepen relations between Foxconn and Sharp continue. It added that a deal made last year for Foxconn and Sharp to operate a factory together in Japan is producing "fruitful results."

The Taiwanese manufacturing giant, best known as the assembler of Apple's iPhone, was expected to secure a 10 percent stake in Sharp last year for $800 million. But so far, the two companies have failed to reach an agreement after Sharp saw its stock price plummet as a result of its ongoing financial woes.

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Reactions to Google's new Chromebook Pixel may have been mixed so far, but at least one high-profile figure in the world of IT can't seem to say enough good things about the device.

“I've joined all the cool kids in having one of the new Google 'Pixel' laptops (aka Chromebooks),” wrote Linux creator Linus Torvalds in a Google+ post on Tuesday. “And it is a beautifulscreen, to the point where I suspect I'll make this my primary laptop.”

Despite believing that laptops should generally weigh 1KG or less—the Pixel tops that by 50 percent—Torvalds added that he's willing to make the sacrifice “because the screen really is that nice.”

'A lot of polish'

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Japan's Sharp has secured a $110 million lifeline investment from Samsung Electronics, and agreed to become a major supplier of screens for the South Korean company's growing electronics empire.

The deal gives Samsung a steady supply of screens and deals a possible blow to chief rival Apple, which has long been a major customer of Sharp. Sharp gains a massive customer in Samsung, the world's largest maker of mobile phones and smartphones.

The agreement will give Samsung a 3 percent share in the struggling Japanese display maker when the investment is completed at the end of this month. Sharp is in the midst of a restructuring as it heads for a nearly $5 billion loss this fiscal year, but is still one of the world's largest LCD panel makers and possesses many cutting edge technologies.

Analysts and industry observers praised the deal.

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This year's MWC may have been lacking in high-end smartphone launches, but the "W" stands for "world" and lower-cost models shown this week are needed to open up the mobile-phone market to more people globally.

Here are some of the trends spotted at Mobile World Congress 2013 that indicate where the smartphone market is headed.

New operating systems

Mozilla's smartphone operating system, Firefox OS, got the most attention, but the Tizen camp led by Samsung Electronics and Intel, Jolla Mobile and its Sailfish Alliance, as well as Canonical, which is hard at work on Ubuntu for smartphones and tablets, were all in Barcelona.

Alcatel One Touch, LG Electronics, and ZTE all are developing smartphones based on the new Firefox OS, with hardware prices expected to be below $100 without subsidies. Huawei Technologies also said it will come out with products later this year, and Sony has voiced its support, but hasn't made a final decision on whether it will develop commercial products.

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LAS VEGAS—You can build more than you might expect with just a little bit of air flow and two microns of water. Like a virtual touchscreen display that appears out of nowhere. That's what Displair can boast anyway, with one of the more eye-catching demos I saw at CES 2013.

Air flows out of the device, interacting with water drops to form a screen where you can beam images from a computer or tablet. But this is no mere projection screen, it's a fully interactive display, as I found it when I was able to play a game of Fruit Ninja just by waving my hand across the Displair's virtual screen.

Displair's Alexander Chachava touted the device's energy efficiency and eco-friendly features when we talked. And it's certainly cleaner than a regular display. It's kind of hard to leave smudges on a screen made up of air, after all.

Is it practical? It could be, even with a $10,000 price tag, if the company succeeds in its goal of having developers build customized apps that fully take advantage of the gesture controls Displair could support. We'll know more later this year when the Displair is slated to arrive by the second quarter of 2013.

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LAS VEGAS—Lazy or inexperienced cooks across America long for a future where appliances instinctively know how to make a meal. Well, the future is almost here.

Luxury appliance maker Dacor expects to introduces its 30-inch, Android-powered Discovery wall oven this week at the International CES.

The company says the smart oven lets you surf the Internet, view recipes, and even enter a guided cooking mode for novice chefs. It was not available for a hands-on at the CES Unveiled event Sunday.

You might not know how long to cook that rack of lamb, but if you key its weight into the 7-inch LCD screen, called the Discovery IQ controller, at the top of the oven, the Discovery does the rest of the work by setting the temperature and a timer.

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For users who want a regular monitor, but still want to control Windows 8 using touch gestures, LG Electronics has introduced the Touch 10 monitor.

The last few months have seen the introduction of many all-in-ones, tablets and laptops that take advantage of Windows 8’s more touch-friendly user interface, but LG thinks there is also room for regular monitors that can do the same.

The Touch 10 monitor allows users to take advantage of the touch-based user interface without having to upgrade their entire PC, according to LG. Just like on other Windows 8-compatible products all 10 fingers can be used simultaneously, allowing users to drag and rotate multiple items, it said.

The monitor also works with a capacitive stylus, which can be purchased separately. It has an In-Plane Switching (IPS) panel, and 1920 by 1080 pixel resolution.

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When multitudes of Windows 8 users start playing with newly purchased hardware in the coming weeks and months, they'll encounter an indignity that once afflicted only smartphone and tablet users: dirty, smudgy, fingerprint-riddled touchscreens.

Ah, yes, the dreaded smudge. It's a problem we've all come to grudgingly accept on mobile device screens, but PC users generally aren't so accepting of people touching—let alone leaving fingerprints on—their desktop displays.

If Microsoft executive Keith Lorizio has his way, some 400 million Windows 8 devices will be active by July 1, 2013. Lorizio was surely including nontouch legacy machines when he made this optimstic declaration last week, and Microsoft has already backed away from Lorizio's comments. But the fact remains that desktop computing is about to get very, very dirty.

So just what is the tech industry doing to head off the collision between PC screens and fingers? Or will desktop users simply resign themselves to a life where dirty screens become the new normal?

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Shige Watanabe remembers the boom days.

"It was solid cars on the roads. The factories ran full steam, constantly," he says, standing in front of the electronics shop he has run for 30 years in the Japanese town of Yaita. A car occasionally cruises by his shop window, packed with Aquos TVs and other Sharp appliances, but the giant Sharp plant across the street is still, its windows dark on a quiet Friday afternoon.

About 1500 miles to the west, in the outskirts of Zhengzhou, China, the scene is very different, with the sounds of traffic and construction heavy in the air. This is Foxconn Electronics territory, and thousands of assembly workers roam the streets between shifts, walking around piles of bricks and construction equipment. Building crews scramble to finish dormitories next to bustling factory lines, and tractors flatten fields nearby to build more.

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In the ongoing race to build ever better flat-screen displays, a potentially disruptive technology has made a small debut at IFA, the consumer electronics show currently taking place in Berlin.

In a corner of the booth of Japan's Sharp are several prototype displays based on a new type of LCD (liquid crystal display) called IGZO.

The clunky IGZO name is derived from indium gallium zinc oxide, the semiconductor material on which the screen is based. Each pixel in an LCD screen is controlled by its own transistor and making those transistors on IGZO brings several favorable characteristics over the amorphous silicon that is used in today's LCD panels.

Electrons move faster in IGZO and that brings benefits in current flow that mean the transistors can be made much smaller. Because the size of the transistor directly affects the size of the pixel, a smaller transistor allows for smaller pixels and so more can be crammed in per inch than today.

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That tradition continued Monday with the unit introducing some new wireless mice and keyboards designed for mobile users, as well as updating its Touch Mouse to better support Windows 8, expected to be released at the end of October.

The "Wedge" mouse ($69.95) and keyboard ($79.95) connect to a notebook or tablet through Bluetooth 4.0 so you don't have to worry about cables or USB transceiver.

The Wedge Touch Mouse can fit in your pocket and supports four-way touch scrolling and navigation, which minimizes the rodent's real estate requirements. BlueTrack Technology is also supported by the device so you can obtain top performance from the mouse regardless of the surface it's operating on. Another nice feature is its Backpack Mode. That conserves the unit's battery life by powering it down when the computer it's paired to powers down or enters sleep mode.

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Just weeks after announcing the deal, Microsoft has closed its acquisition of Perceptive Pixel (PPI), whose large-scale, multitouch displays Microsoft plans to use to boost its collaboration, meetings, and presentation products.

PPI will become part of the Office Division and its founder, president and CTO Jeff Han will become a general manager reporting to the division's President Kurt DelBene, Giovanni Mezgec, general manager for Lync said in a blog post on Monday.

In an interview when the deal was announced on July 9, Mezgec said that "a tremendous opportunity" exists in the collaboration and productivity market to change how meetings are conducted.

By making large, touch-screen displays "mainstream" in workplaces, the work environment can be "fundamentally" changed, he said at the time.

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Viewers of the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics have weighed in, calling it everything from “remarkable” to “hilariously quirky,” and even “embarrassing.”

But viewers seem to unanimously agree on the awesomeness of the event’s human JumboTron, in which 70,800 people in the audience were “turned…  into pixels,” as The Wall Street Journal put it.

If you tuned in (or caught the live stream) to watch the show, you might have wondered how the audience didn’t look like an audience at all. Instead, they resembled what seemed to be the largest TV screen ever, projecting light patterns that even portrayed Queen Elizabeth and Michelle Obama.

Organizers pulled it off by providing each member of the audience with a ten-inch electronic paddle wired to a central computer and outfitted with nine full-color LCD squares.

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Developers are now required to provide Retina-ready app icons when submitting an app to Apple's Mac App Store.

The new compulsory requirement seems to have been put in place by Apple last week, when developer Daniel Jalkut noted that apps can now only be submitted to the Mac App Store if the application bundle contains a huge 1024-by-1024 icon.

This pixel-packed requirement will ensure that all icons are suitable for the new MacBook Pro with Retina display, and suggests that Apple is looking towards launching more Retina Macs in the future.

However, these Retina icons mean that apps will be larger download sizes, and will therefore take up more space on a Mac's hard drive. The icons will also take up more of the Mac's memory when rendered, which could cause some older computers to struggle.

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For my money, there's no better way to transform your computing experience than by adding a second monitor.

Nothing, but nothing, beats having Outlook open on one screen and your browser on another. Or your browser and Excel. Or Excel and Word. You get the idea.

This approach not only saves you the time and hassle of switching back and forth between windows, but also makes multiple windows visible simultaneously -- great for when you need to, say, drag and drop data from one to another.

Best of all, monitors are cheap. You can add a 22-inch LCD to your setup for under $150, or a 24-inch display for under $200.

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Windows 8's support for multiple monitors is better than previous versions of the operating system, but it still needs improvement.

Although users can now run a taskbar through all of their screens in Windows 8, they can launch the Start menu only from one of them. And in the absence of a proper Start button, getting to that menu can be tricky because your cursor can spill onto the next screen over.

So, as with previous versions of Windows, third-party programs must fill the gap in Windows 8's lackluster multi-monitor support. DisplayFusion Pro, my favorite Windows multi-monitor software, just got an update to support Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and it eliminates the headaches caused by Microsoft's native software. The “Pro” version costs $25 for one PC, or $35 for all computers in a home.

DisplayFusion brings a proper Start button to your secondary monitors in Windows 8, and lets you open a classic pop-up Start menu to launch applications within the monitor you're using. You no longer have to find the hot corner on your main monitor, go into Metro, open an application, then drag it into the desktop window you want to use. (DisplayFusion users will find the new Start menu options under “Settings > Taskbar > “Use alternate Start Menu.”)

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A combination of new technology, plus a strong desire on the part of major companies to transform glass, will affect nearly every category of consumer electronics, from smart watches to phones to tablets to desktop computers to smart homes and offices.

Hundreds of companies and organizations are working on the coming glass revolution. But here are four companies and one university that announced serious breakthroughs recently, shattering old ideas about what's possible with glass.

Google Wants Wearable Glass

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Intel has revealed that its Ivy Bridge processor is built for Retina display computers, hinting that Apple's redesigned range of MacBook Pros will have Retina display technology.

9to5Mac reports that Kirk Skaugen, Intel's Vice President and General Manager of the PC Client Group, revealed that the new processors are built for Retina display at the Intel Developer Forum earlier in April.

The Ivy Bridge Processors are expected to arrive at the end of the month, and it is widely predicted that Apple will overhaul its MacBook Pro range to coincide with the launch of Intel's new processors.

The report points out that the term Retina display was coined by Apple, so it is interesting that Skaugen chose to use Apple's term when describing high-resolution computers. Skaugen said that the Ivy Bridge processor could power 2560-by-1600 displays, which is an impressive four times the amount of pixels currently found in the 13-inch MacBook Pro's display.

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Using 123D Catch, users can take a collection of images of the same object at different angles and have the software automatically create a 3D model. So far the software has mostly been used to create models of much smaller objects, but Autodesk decided to see how far they could scale up the process by creating a model of their corporate headquarters and documented the process on the company blog.

Autodesk created a short video of the whole process from drone launch to landing for you to peruse.

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