Acer unveiled the world's first laptop to feature a curved screen.
The company says the innovation should make it the best choice to play video games on the machine.Curved displays are seen on several TVs already, but the feature has both benefits and disadvantages over flat-panel technology.
The Taiwanese company are still the ground breakers on this new innovation on PC. Several other consumer electronics brands - including Samsung, Lenovo, DJI, Sony and Huawei among other smaller brands are set to unveil new kit of their own at the Ifa technology show in the German capital this week.
'Deeper views
The Predator notebook's screen is much bigger than the normal PC screen - measuring 21in (53.3cm) - but it is its shape that made it possible for the company to claim a "world's first"."The curvature of the screen matches the natural curve of the eyes and gives a wider field of view, this allows people to have higher definition in game details, like spotting enemies or looking in the rear view mirror in racing games, more easily to give a better, more immersive gaming experience for the user."
Curved screens are widely used in the cinemas and first appeared in TVs about three years ago.
They also produce a greater sense of depth, because the images they show are not on a single plane.
Samsung, in particular, has been a strong advocate of the technology. Its two highest selling TVs come only in curved designs.
But .
"Curved screens are great if you are in exactly the right position and equidistant from the various points of the display, but as soon as you are not in the ideal place you get distortions of the image and glare, other manufacturers have experimented with and then abandoned the look mainly for that reason"
"But I can imagine it makes more sense on a laptop for a single user, unlike with TVs this is a problem, as you tend to have more than one person watching at a time."
Eye-tracker
Some of the model's other unusual features for gamers includes:- The inclusion of eye-tracking technology developed by Sweden's Tobii.
- aim at targets by looking at them, freeing up their hands for other controls
- change the direction they are looking at by moving their eyes
- make use of "dynamic lighting" - the overall scene dims if the player looks at a very bright object or does the reverse if they look into shadows, mimicking the way our eyes work
Acer worked with another Taiwanese company, MSI, in building the sensors into a laptop, It was originally developed to help people with disabilities control PCs.
Earlier only Motorola Mobility had been the only major tech company to have targeted the sector, although there are dozens of smaller firms involved, It forecast the sector would grow by 24% by 2019.Until now
