A couch potato's dream: CES gadgets for every room, need

      They lined up to see demonstrations of high-definition television, they crowded around tiny screens to learn about palm-sized computers, they even scrunched into sports cars to listen to next year's chassis-thumping mobile stereo systems.
      But don't let them fool you: What delegates to the sprawling 1998 International Consumer Electronics Show really wanted Friday was 10 minutes in The Chair.
      "Oh, oh, this is better than sex," product designer Wayne Moffett murmured as he undulated in Panasonic's Great Escape shiatsu massage lounger -- retail price $2,600 and up.
     

The hype fills a screen at the Direct TV/USSB booth at the Consumer Electronics Show Friday. The display at the Las Vegas Convention Center promotes satellite dish systems. Photos by John Gurzinski. Heather Cox helps Bill Cook as he tries out Union Reality's 3-D computer game at the Consumer Electronics Show. The headset allows the player to control parts of the game action by turning to either side.

"Mmm," purred Lisa Turner, a buyer from Stone Mountain, Ga. "It's pulsating down my spine. It's running across my back."
      "This," said Atlanta buyer Chris Weber as he surrendered the chair to his brother, Steven, "is the greatest moment of my life."
      Don't get out much, do ya kiddo?
      Then again, that kind of hyperbole could be excused given the setting, the consumer electronics industry's annual over-the-top exhibition of the latest in high-tech wizardry. The show continues through Sunday at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Sands Expo, the Las Vegas Hilton and Caesars Palace.
      The underlying theme at CES this year -- beyond the push to make everything bigger, louder, faster, more versatile yet user-friendly and always, always more compact to make room for next year's add-on -- seems short and sweet:
      Stay home.
      Fill your house with digital wide-screen TVs, home theater systems with surround sound and digital video discs, TV-top Internet surfers, virtual reality computer games, satellite TV dishes, scrambled cordless telephones -- and take it all in from a comfy, vibrating chair.
      The headline-grabbing item at CES this winter is high-definition TV, billed as the first real revolution in television since the NBC peacock grew its first feathers in color. Broadcasters will have to convert to the new digital standard by 2003, which means consumers will have to buy a new set or, at the very least, a converter for the old one.
      The HDTV sets on display at the convention center duly wowed CES delegates, who oohed and ahhed at the ultra-real, crystal clear tones and textures on wide screens that can hang on a living room wall.
      Two Las Vegas TV stations -- KLVX, Channel 10, and KLAS, Channel 8 -- broadcast experimental high-definition signals to the convention site. KLVX General Manager Tom Axtell said Channel 10 is on the leading edge of the technology, which he said will allow the public TV station to offer either high-definition programming or multiple channels on one signal.
      "This could mean Channel 10 could provide all viewers a channel of just the kind of programming their prefer, whether it be children's, nature and science, history or music," he said.
      Complementing the HDTV sets at the show are home theater systems that rattled display booths with thundering soundtracks from "Con Air," "Eraser," "True Lies," "Air Force One," and other special effects laden flicks.
      "I don't know why anyone would want to go to a movie theater with a screen like that and a sound system like that," mused Cal Bock, a car stereo buyer from Denver.
      "Well, I can get a movie ticket for seven bucks," said Tom Cawley, another Denver delegate. "You'd be kissing off, what -- seven thousand? Seventeen?"
      Less sexy but probably of more interest to the average TV watcher was Tri-Vision Electronics' V-gis system, one of the first pieces of equipment with the long-promised V-chip.
      The V-chip, which must be available this year under a 1996 law passed by Congress, enables parents to block programming they deem objectionable, even if they're not around.
      Future TVs must come with the V-chip built in, but V-gis hooks up to an existing TV. The small black box reads the ratings information embedded in the TV signal -- the TV-Y, TV-G, TV-PG alphabet soup that appears at the start of each show -- and then compares it with what parents have programmed in, blacking out the screen if the show doesn't pass muster.
      Tri-vision demonstrated the system using clips from the movie "Get Shorty" -- which blinked off because of violence -- and bawdy TV talker Jerry Springer -- who was booted for sex and coarse language.
      Much of the technology on display this year has been around the block at least once before -- Internet TV, compact satellite dishes, computerized navigation systems for cars, digital telephones -- leaving manufacturers to point out advances, play up the new and improved.
      Satellite dish systems, for example, now can offer regional versions of the service that includes local stations, eliminating the need for a separate antenna. Cordless phones let users stray much farther from the base and check messages and caller ID from the handset.
      It all left some delegates overwhelmed, to say the least.
      "It's just too much to take in," said first-timer Seth Lee as a woman at a video game booth pressed a brochure into his hand. "I mean, they're are giving away a Ferrari but they're selling something for my computer. I'm lost."
      Listen, there's this chair about three aisles down and around that corner ...