A Mighty Morphing

By JOSHUA QUITTNER/LAS VEGAS

Now here's a happy scene: a dozen glamorous models wearing cherry-red smocks are cooing contentedly in a dim room, hunched over Virtual Boy, Nintendo's long-awaited, low-cost virtual-reality rig for Everyman. Or Everyboy. Or Everygirl. Whatever. The women are learning how to demonstrate it, fooling around with a prototype of a boxing video game. ("Face down in the goggles, please. That's it. Click here to throw a right, there to throw a left, and don't forget to duck!") But hurry. It's 7:30 a.m., and the wide glass doors are about to swing open on the Winter Consumer Electronics Show, the equivalent of opening night for the $56 billion home-electronics industry.

More than 90,000 glassy-eyed technology middlemen tramped through the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center last week, looking for the best of what's new, what's hot and what's cool in Gadgetland and putting together their wish list for next Christmas. What they found was an electronic melting pot -- a million square feet of whirring appliances and beeping devices that are turning into one another faster than you can say digital convergence. Telephones are morphing into televisions. Televisions are evolving into computers. Computers are turning into video games. And they're spawning a new breed of gimcracks that fall somewhere in between, from satellite-driven global positioning devices for cars to cellular pagers that beam messages -- Dick Tracy-style -- directly to your wristwatch.

Take AT&T's TV Information Center, for instance. Plug your cable TV and phone lines into it, and you've got a television that doubles as a secretary, organizing your voice messages and gathering E-mail while letting you keep up / with the soaps. By the time the $329 "intelligent device" goes on sale next spring, AT&T hopes to be able to offer a whole range of telephone-cum- television information services, from home banking to personalized weather reports to crossword-puzzle crib sheets.

For those who want their information delivered in a trickle, rather than in a stream, consider Motorola's Sports Trax, a pager that feels like a cross between a radio and the sports page of a daily newspaper. Pick your favorite baseball team, and the clever pager "trax" it like a die-hard fan, transmitting pitch-by-pitch updates of every game and displaying the action on a calculator-like screen in real time all season long -- if there ever is another season.

Or maybe you'd like to play a little ball yourself. Virtual ball, that is, on a video-game machine more powerful than your desktop computer. Sega, Sony and Nintendo are all racing to get their next-generation video-game players to the U.S. in time to win the hearts and minds of American vidkids next Christmas. Sega and Sony have already introduced new 32-bit game players in Japan, and Nintendo last week gave analysts a sneak preview of what its 64-bit Ultra 64 will look like. The wait -- and the extra computer power -- seemed worth it; in action scenes the Ultra's images were as seamless and smooth as, well, television.

Sony and Philips, meanwhile, are trying to wring television-quality video out of compact discs. The two companies, which collaborated to set the standard for music CDs, have come up with a formula that crams 135 minutes of vcr-quality video onto a standard-size CD -- enough to show 97% of the movies now being rented for vcrs, according to a Sony spokesman. Hollywood should love the idea, since the discs are a lot cheaper to make than videotapes and a lot harder to copy, but other equipment manufacturers haven't agreed to adopt the proposed standard.

Finally, this could be the year in which computers turn into Bob? Yes, Bob, the latest hoo-ha from Microsoft that is supposed to transform your computer into something more, um, human. Seeking to smooth over whatever user- unfriendliness still adheres to the latest version of Windows, Bob ties together all the uses most people will have for their home computer into cartoon-like images of a living room, kitchen or den. Many of the objects on the desks and shelves do things. Click on the paper and pencil, for example, to launch a word-processing program. Click on the calendar to bring up your daily appointment book. Click on a checkbook to see where your money has gone. When you get stuck, cutesy characters with attitude help you out with grunts and gestures and little bits of printed instruction. Microsoft says Bob will ship in the spring for $99, with virtually no manual. Now that's progress.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/Las Vegas