Quartics, based in Irvine, California, plans to link monitors to computers via wired or wireless USB connections. The company expects its partners to come out with USB monitors sometime in February 2007. According to Quartics' Mahboob Akhter, USB is the future for multi-monitor setups; theoretically speaking, more than 25 displays could be hooked up to a single laptop, which typically do not have a VGA port.
Quartics is ultimately hoping to transfer video content from a PC to a TV, wirelessly. Shown at CES 2007, a prototype of such a PC2TV device currently uses a Wi-Fi radio. The box is wired (VGA/DVI) to your TV/monitor. Then you must connect to the box as you would to any wireless network. Drivers for the device are automatically supplied when you launch your web browser. You can then mirror or extend your PC's display to your TV.
The Quartics system must compress and decompress the video content because of the limitation of a wireless connection. The quality is consequently affected – it is worse than an image from a DVD player, but still fairly decent. The Quartics chip is already implemented in Addlogix products and is planned to be embedded in some televisions by Fall 2007.
News source: PC World
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