It's fitting that Chief of Engineering would speak at a forum dedicated to the advancement of modern technology.  LeVar Burton opened the third day of the Intel Developer forum in San Francisco by reminding attendees to keep dreaming. 

As reported by PCMag.com, LeVar joined Eric Kim, vice president and general manager of Intel's digital home division, to present a future TV concept experience, which merged live viewing with DVR functionality, sharing, emailed content, and social networking, including a video call.

The third day of the Intel Developer Forum opened with science fiction, and ended with the steps needed to make that fiction a reality. Intel announced its next-generation "Sodaville" chip for TV set-top boxes, which will be based on the Atom microprocessor.

Burton reminded the audience that the dream must exist before the reality. "Do not be afraid to dream that big dream: What if? What if? What if? What are the contributions that you will bring to make that dream a reality?" he asked.

Last year, Kim and Intel announced the CE3100, an integrated system-on-a-chip that could be used in set-top boxes to integrate the Internet on TVs. The announcement was a bombshell of sorts, a surprise partnership with Yahoo and its Widget Channel. The combination created a sidebar to the HDTV experience, allowing users to access weather, stocks, and other widgets while video was running in the background.

"But putting PC on a TV doesn't work; we know, we tried it," Kim said. "People want an immersive TV experience on their television." People want the power of the Internet on a TV, but they want it "simple," Kim said.

"What's needed is a pure Internet development framework, Kim said – and the most popular version of that is Adobe's Flash technology. David Wadhwani, general manager of the platform business unit at Adobe, said that the company has opened Flash and removed all license fees, requiring only that manufacturers to open the platform to third-party developers, as part of the Open Screen initiative.

Wadhwani demoed Flash 10 running on an Intel processor, showing full-screen Flash browsing, not to a Web site, but to a custom screen designed by Disney.

The Sodaville processor uses an Atom core, and Intel has brought "Moore's Law" to shrink the processor to 45 nanometer technology. The Atom Processor CE4100, as it will be formally called, includes a 1080p video engine not to just decompress streams, but also recorded content supplied from another source, such as a hard drive. Intel doubled the speed of its 2D/3D engine, and added support for MPEG-4. The chip uses either DDR-2 or DDR-3 memory.  (source PCMag.com)

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