Six years after its official launch, the consumer electronics industry's high-definition successor to DVD still hasn't taken off.

That's got manufacturers concerned enough to take action. Fortunately for consumers, the action will include lowering prices, adding features and integrating players into "connected ecosystems" that let users take advantage of increasingly popular online media as well as content that comes on shiny plastic discs.

Three main factors contribute to the perception that the now-dominant high-definition Blu-ray disc standard is stagnating: high overall prices, a general satisfaction with the current DVD format and buyer confusion in the midst of competing and multiplying technologies.

"The [Blu-ray format] is being adopted in a similar pattern as previous technologies, but it is not being adopted at the same [rate]," says Paul Erickson, Director of DVD and HD Market Research for DisplaySearch. While DVD also took years to become popular, he says, the adoption curve for Blu-ray is even longer and is fraught with bumpy obstacles, such as a few DRM security code and playback problems.

The two-and-a-half-year standards war with a competing high-def format, HD DVD, certainly didn't help. The battle ended in early 2008 when HD DVD's last major supporter, Toshiba, threw in the towel, but consumer confusion lingers. A tough economy has also slowed consumers' acceptance of the format.

At next week's CEDIA 2008 conference, an annual gathering of television and home theater manufacturers, retailers and installers, expect to see an orgy of competing Blu-ray players. Some will focus on low prices (like Philips and Netlogic), and others will highlight features that integrate their physical content with wireless systems to download content from the internet (such as BD Live).

Still, not everyone is convinced that these measures will help Blu-ray. Josh Martin of the Yankee Group says there are still too many "unclear messages" surrounding the format (such as unconventional BD spec profiles, which offer different versions of a player's capabilities) that throw that ecosystem out of whack.

There's also a value disconnect: Most people can't justify purchasing a Blu-ray player that costs five times as much as a DVD player -- especially if it's not five times better. "The opportunity lies in creating a simple, mass-market device," says Martin. So far, that device hasn't arrived, despite tries by everyone from Sony to Magnavox.

Until that device arrives, Martin says, a small price change (like Sony's recent 25 percent drop announcement), or even a cool spec upgrade won't make a difference. "Blu-ray will continue to struggle towards the end of [2008] because the format adoption is driven by price," Martin concludes.

Andy Parsons, a senior vice president at Pioneer and chair of the Blu-ray Association, sees a different side. He points to the 8 million Blu-ray players already sold this year (on pace to triple last year's sales) as an example that people are excited about Blu-ray and HD technologies in general, and will respond to more aggressive features:

"People say [low Blu-ray sales last year] were because of a lack of demand but it was really a lack of supplies. The demand was high," Parsons says.

The shortage wasn't caused by the difficulty and expense of creating Blu-ray discs and players, which many critics of the format often cite, but because manufacturers simply didn't expect to sell that many players in the first place, Parsons says.

Given the state of change, companies at CEDIA 2008 are focusing on developing the technology, regardless of the price. Pioneer will release a new Elite player next week that the company says will surpass every other high-end player in quality, but it comes with a heart-stopping $2,000 price tag. Yamaha is coming out with its own high-end player, as is up-and-coming Sherwood. And, it seems, every big-time audio maker at CEDIA is preparing huge systems to blow up the high-end sound produced by these players.

But that relative excess is the heart of the problem, says Gartner analyst Steve Kleyhans. For him, the entertainment ecosystem is simply too expensive to keep up with. In order to fully realize the value of a Blu-ray player's high-definition features, families also need to buy new HDTVs, new speakers and who knows, maybe an extra fluffy couch. Watching an HD movie on the 14-inch analog TV just won't cut it.

That's why Kleyhans predicts that more HDTVs will be sold as more Blu-ray players and other high-def media proliferates.

What about the threat from downloadable or streaming internet video? Interestingly, most manufacturers and analysts we talked with do not believe that online media is an immediate threat to optical discs.

First, the national bandwidth infrastructure is incomplete and can't come close to delivering HD movies on a wide enough scale to compete with physical discs within the next five years. Second, the market for set-top boxes that display internet video on your TV offers too many options, and most services are still incomplete (for example, Roku's set-top box only provides access to 10 percent of the Netflix catalog). And third, as Martin concludes, the experience is "still not as simple as popping in a disc."

It looks like for the majority of people, popping a disc in a slot for entertainment is proving too hard of a compulsion to let go. It's just going to take awhile before that disc is a Blu-ray one.

Jeremy Mayer collects antique typewriters, but he doesn't display them in a curio cabinet. Instead, he tears them apart, then turns the components into sleek, sci-fi-inspired bugs, skeletons and anatomically correct human figures.

Mayer, who describes his work as a cross between Leonardo da Vinci's mechanical drawings and the gritty futures imagined by sci-fi maestros William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, assembles his artwork without welding, soldering or gluing.

Left: It takes roughly 40 typewriters and 1,000 hours for Mayer to assemble a full-scale figurine like this reclining female form. He's made only three full-size human figures over the last 14 years, but as he prepares for a spring show in San Diego, he'll construct four in 2008.

"I'd been trying to get my figures to look less creepy," said Mayer. "This one has so much personality and presence, which helps."

Mayer put together this metallic bust for a 2005 art show in the Seattle area. To fashion the hair, he fitted multiple typebars onto the mechanical cranium and pulled out the innards of a machine to create steel skin.

Later, Mayer realized he created the head in his likeness. "He's somewhat of a broken-looking character," said Mayer. "And somehow it looks exactly like me. I hope to do more of them."

Mayer's creations, like this skeletal aluminum framework, can stand close to seven feet tall and often weigh between 60 and 100 pounds.

"I didn't make him anatomically correct, because I thought people would freak out about a robot with a penis," said Mayer. Now he's ready to go further with this piece, which he finished in 1994.

"I may retrofit it," said the artist, who often travels to homes where his artwork is displayed to tweak the designs.

Although perfecting steely skeletons is Mayer's main building obsession, he also likes to assemble macabre felines. He estimates that he's made about 14 of them -- and they are always popular with buyers.

"All you have to do is look at StumbleUpon and see how much people on the internet love cats," said Mayer. They tend to stand about two feet tall.

"I'm not going for whimsy," said Mayer, who experimented with a series of machine masks like this one for a show. "So I will probably never do a set [of the masks] again." Still, Mayer says he enjoys toying around with spare parts that don't end up in one of his massive pieces.

To create his mecha-cricket, Mayer fashioned the guts of a Royal typewriter into the abdomen and thorax. In order to keep the body color uniform, he salvaged similar pieces from the typewriter graveyard in his studio.

The legs are bent keys, and the head was made from a dismantled rubber pad. The insect measures about 18 inches long, from its spindly legs to the tips of its antennae.

This standing humanoid was commissioned by a Star Trek fanatic and friend of Mayer's who wanted a sculpture with robotic capabilities and trolled eBay for parts.

Mayer installed a Handy Board processor in the chest cavity and rigged it to a motion sensor and controls that cause the head to wiggle and the eyes to blink.

"The actual mechanics work really well," said Mayer.

Mayer often takes inspiration from the shape of the typewriter itself to mold his figures. He prefers to dismantle Royal Safari typewriters for his female creations, using the parts for the inner thighs, labia and breasts.

"That's how the typewriter was made in the first place," said Mayer. "The shape resembles the human body and forms of nature."

Mayer, 36, crafts his typewriter creations in this studio in Tahoe City, California.

He scours flea markets and second-hand stores weekly for vintage versions of the original word processor. After breaking the machines down by hand, Mayer spends hours categorizing the parts.

1985: French and American researchers announce they've found the wreck of the RMS Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Jaws drop.

The most famous shipwreck of all time, the purportedly unsinkable Titanic hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage on a cold, starry night in April 1912. The ship sank to the bottom within hours, killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew. A scant 700 or so escaped in the insufficient lifeboats.

As time passed, the glamour of the Titanic -- its roster of rich and famous First Class passengers, its luxurious decor, its speed, its vaunted bulwarks against the perils of the sea, its very hubris -- inspired countless retellings, from best-selling nonfiction books to glossy, romantic film fictions.

Treasure hunters, historians and explorers yearned to know what secrets might lie in the Titanic's wreck. The ship had sent radio distress messages, so its last known surface position was no secret. But the Atlantic is more than two miles deep in that area, and diving technology was insufficient to the task for many decades. What finally worked was a little help from their friends ... in the Navy.

The French research vessel Le Suroit, in the course of testing a new sonar system early in the summer of 1985, searched for the wreck in a 150-square-mile sea-floor search area. Aboard that cruise was Robert Ballard, leader of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Deep Submergence Laboratory and another Woods Hole colleague. Before turning back Aug. 6, the sonar eliminated large swaths of ocean floor as possible locations for the Titanic.

A few weeks later, three French scientists set out from the Azores with their American counterparts aboard the Woods Hole research vessel Knorr. Looking only where Le Suroit had not, this voyage had an advantage. It also had Argo, Woods Hole's new robotic, deep-towed sonar and videocam system.

Just after 6 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Sept. 1, Argo spotted one of the ship's boilers and other debris about 230 miles south of Nova Scotia. The first humans to see the Titanic in more than seven decades included four Woods Hole crew members, two French scientists and a U.S. Navy officer.

The Navy, you say? What was the Navy's interest in a sunken ocean liner, however famous? You're right. The Navy was not interested in the Titanic, but it was interested in finding sunken ships.

Sunken submarines, to be specific. It was only this year that the story has surfaced. The Navy wanted to use Woods Hole's fancy new submersible equipment to locate the wrecks of two nuclear submarines that had sunk in the area, USS Thresher and USS Scorpion. The Navy wanted to know if the Soviets had sunk the Scorpion, and the Pentagon also wanted to know if the ships' reactors were leaking any radioactive material. (If not, perhaps it would be safe, they thought, to dispose of other nuclear waste undersea.)

The probable grave of the Titanic lay between the positions where the subs had gone to the bottom. Ballard wanted funding from the Navy. The Navy wanted to check out its lost subs. It was a match made in Davy Jones' Locker.

The Navy didn't give Ballard explicit permission to search for theTitanic, but merely told him that once the sub wrecks were found and explored, he could use mission time as he saw fit.

Ballard and associates announced the find in a ship-to-shore interview Sept. 2. They spent the last four days of the voyage shooting more video of the debris field and 35mm shots with a second towed vehicle, called Angus, or the Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey.

Ballard estimated in 2004 that 8,000 to 9,000 pieces of jewelry, porcelain, glasses and other relics had been removed by a legal salvage operation. The location of the Titanic is no longer a secret, and Ballard said submarines have bumped into it and landed on it, destroying its mainmast and damaging large areas of the deck. He railed at the tourist subs he said both cause damage and leave litter. One American couple even held a shipwreck wedding in a submersible perched on the Titanic's deck.

Source: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Geographic Society

The last time Wired reviewed equipment designed to survive the highest mountain in the world (May 2000), climbers were schlepping 9-pound, $11,000 sat phones on the trek to Everest's 29,000 feet. Climbing tech these days is ultralight, cheaper, and practically Everest-proof. Any season now, mountaineers will be Twittering from the summit ("OMG my toz R bLk!"). Here's some of the latest gear to leave us breathless.

1) Zeal Optics SPP Goggles Besides 100-mph winds, Everest is legendary for causing snow blindness. In 2003, Zeal Optics was one of the first to offer photochromatic polarized lenses in goggles. The new SPP adds a spherical lens design for better peripheral vision. The combo equals near-perfect acuity in all conditions, preventing scorched corneas and errant steps on cliff edges. $200

2) Spot Messenger At the touch of a button, the Spot Messenger grabs coordinates from GPS satellites and sends them to your Spot Web site so Mom can track you on Google Maps. Hanging from an ice wall? Hit the 911 button to ping the International Emergency Response Center. (But try to avoid drama above 21,000 feet, where Spot's accuracy can stray.) $170

3) Roper SwitchBack UltraMobile PC Back in 2000, even mountain-ready laptops weren't up for Everest: "You can actually hear the hard drives screaming," one documentarian said. Standard drive heads ride on a cushion of air, which thins out as you climb. The rugged SwitchBack is available with a solid-state drive that works up to the brain-scrambling height of 20,000 feet. $6,000

4) Black Diamond Cobra Ice Tool The carbon-fiber Cobra features a sawtooth pick on the business end (for ice penetration) and a modular head design that lets climbers attach an adze for chopping steps or a hammer for driving pitons. Everest hopefuls sucking wind up to base camp will barely notice its 600 grams. $300

One key change they had in mind was something called a multiprocess architecture, the system that helps the computer keep going when an application crashes or freezes. Why not extend that idea to browsers, so if something crashes in a tab, the other tabs are unperturbed? Also, for that matter, why not set things up so that you can drag an existing tab to create a new window? Starting from scratch had other advantages. You could design it to look cleaner and run faster, the twin dogmas of the Google corporate religion.

Around June 2006, Goodger, Fisher, and another former Mozillan named Brian Ryner cooked up a small prototype. Their first big decision involved the choice of a rendering engine, the software that processes the HTML code of a Web page into the stuff that appears on your screen. The two major open source options were Gecko, used by Firefox, and WebKit, which powers Apple's Safari browser. The word was that WebKit (which had already been adopted by the group developing Google's Android mobile operating system) could be nasty fast — three times as fast as Gecko, in one example.

In a few weeks, they had a simple application running WebKit on Windows that kept going even when a Web page crashed a tab. Early on, Goodger recalls, "our prototypes had a picture of a little tab that was unhappy, and if a tab died you'd see that. It was the first piece of personality in the product."

Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. "I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it," says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. "Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake."

No one will say exactly when the browser project got the official green light. Pichai recalls an executive meeting when Schmidt no longer seemed as opposed as he had been. If Google did go for it, the CEO said, the team had to produce something very different from Explorer and Firefox. In addition, a Google browser would have to be fast, and it would have to be open source. Which, of course, was exactly what the team already had in mind.

In any case, by the autumn of 2006 the line between unofficial concept and formal project had been crossed. "One Friday, there was a meeting called with like an hour's notice," engineer Brett Wilson says. "We were told, 'The management is thinking about doing our own browser — what do you think about that?' Everybody was a combination of excited and freaked out." Part of the freak-out was they knew full well that building a competitive browser was a massive undertaking. There were also mixed feelings because of the group's attachment to Firefox, an icon of open source development and a hedge against Microsoft's dominance. "The fear was that people were going to read this as sabotaging Firefox," says Erik Kay, an engineer who joined the team in October 2006. The Googlers were mollified by the fact that their browser would be 100 percent open source: Google's innovations could potentially find their way into the Mozilla codebase. "We really want to make Firefox successful, as well as other open source browsers," Upson says.

As part of Google's Firefox effort, Pichai had been meeting with Mozilla head Mitchell Baker, and at some point he told her about Google's project. Baker now says a Google browser is a mixed bag for Mozilla and Firefox. She sees the effort as a vindication of Mozilla's belief that browser choice is essential. "If Google comes up with some good new ideas, that's really great for users," she says. "Competition spurs the best in us." But she also understands that many of her users will download Google's app. "We expect people will try it and come back," she says. "Mozilla exists because independence is important."

A less weighty issue was what to dub the product. After considering some ridiculous codenames (Upson says they were so awful that he took the un-Googly step of a top-down veto), the project borrowed its moniker from the term used to describe the frame, toolbars, and menus bordering a browser window: chrome.

One more hire was key. Because Chrome was supposed to be optimized to run Web applications, a crucial element would be the JavaScript engine, a "virtual machine" that runs Web application code. The ideal person to construct this was a Danish computer scientist named Lars Bak. In September 2006, after more than 20 years of nonstop labor designing virtual machines, Bak had been planning to take some time off to work on his farm outside Århus. Then Google called.

Bak set up a small team that originally worked from the farm, then moved to some offices at the local university. He understood that his mission was to provide a faster engine than in any previous browser. He called his team's part of the project "V8." "We decided we wanted to speed up JavaScript by a factor of 10, and we gave ourselves four months to do it," he says. A typical day for the Denmark team began between 7 and 8 am; they programmed constantly until 6 or 7 at night. The only break was for lunch, when they would wolf down food in five minutes and spend 20 minutes at the game console. "We are pretty damn good at Wii Tennis," Bak says.

They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. "We just did some benchmark runs today," Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. "We sort of underestimated what we could do," Bak says.

Speed may be Chrome's most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better — you've made something new. "As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they'll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them," Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft's worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system.

Google also brought in reinforcements to implement the multiprocess architecture that allowed each open tab to run like a separate, self-contained program. In May 2007, it acquired GreenBorder Technologies, a software security firm whose technology was designed to isolate IE and Firefox activities into virtual sessions, or "sandboxes," where malware intrusions couldn't mess with other activities or data on your computer. When the deal was announced publicly, tech pundits wondered whether it meant that Google was going into the antivirus business. Only after the acquisition did GreenBorder's engineers learn that their job was to construct sandboxes for the tabs of a new browser. "It was confusing," says Carlos Pizano, one of the GreenBorder hires. "They would not say what they wanted to sandbox."

The team was growing, but the process never got bogged down in bureaucracy. In the project's early stages, Chromers would all have lunch together at a table in one of the Google cafés. Soon even the largest table couldn't accommodate them all. Working in an open source spirit, every engineer was free to check out any piece of code and tweak or improve it. Rakowski always tried to keep things light, one day awarding tins of chrome polish to the best bug catchers.

As the plumbing aspects of the product fell into place, activity focused on user interface. From the beginning, the Chrome team hoped that its visual presentation would be so understated that people wouldn't even think they were using a browser. The mantra became "Content, not chrome," which is sort of weird given the name of the browser. ("We've learned to live with the irony," Mark Larson says.) The clearest expression of this comes when you drag a tab containing a Web application like Gmail to its own separate window and specify that you want an "app shortcut." At that point, the tabs, buttons, and address bars fall away and the Web app looks pretty much like a desktop app. Welcome to the cloud era.

When deciding what buttons and features to include, the team began with the mental exercise of eliminating everything, then figuring out what to restore. The back button? No-brainer. The forward button? Less essential, but it survived. But if you're a big fan of the browser status bar — that meter that tells you what percent of a page has loaded — you're out of luck with Chrome.

And then there was the bookmarks bar. At first, engineers thought they could kill it. Chrome introduces several new navigation methods, including one where the browser figures out where you want to go next with no typing required. And when you do type something in, you use the "omnibox," a combination of address bar and search box: Just tell it what you're thinking and it delivers a Web address, search results, or popular destinations that fit your query, all in non-intrusive text underneath the box. It's a bulked-up version of "I'm Feeling Lucky." Still, user tests showed that some people just love to navigate by clicking on the bookmark bar. The compromise: If the user has previously configured the bar in IE or Firefox, Chrome will import the setup. Otherwise, users won't have a bookmark bar unless they choose to.

It's incredible that something as potentially game-changing as a Google browser has stayed under wraps for two years. It wasn't until mid-2007, about a year into the project, that the team let employees outside the group even see what they were doing. At the first of a series of Tech Talks featuring the current prototype (events designed, in part, as a way of recruiting internally for the ever-growing team) the reaction was volcanic. Googlers broke into spontaneous applause when various features, like dragging a tab into a new window, were demo'd. As the number of people who knew about Chrome increased, the inevitable occurred — word did leak out to a blog or two, yet nothing came of those stray items. No reporter put it all together. "I think it was because rumors about Google browsers have been around so long — it's like sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster," Upson says.

On the eve of the launch, Pichai shares some of his ambitions for Chrome. How many people will use it? "Many millions," he says. "I want my mom to use it. I want my dad to use it." The Google imprimatur doesn't assure success, but Pichai believes that even if Chrome doesn't snare huge market share, its innovations will improve the landscape. "We benefit directly if the Web gets better," he says.

As launch approaches, the team has just moved into new space in a freshly renovated building on the Google campus, and there's another all-hands gathering in the biggest conference room available. It's standing room only. Milk and cookies are provided. After some initial business, Rakowski hands the floor over to Goodger. The rumpled engineer talks about the benefits of making Chrome an open source product — the code will be publicly released and a community will emerge to determine the browser's evolution. "We'll be able to scale our testing efforts," he says. "It'll enable people to do things we haven't thought of. And it'll generate trust that we're not doing something evil."

As the meeting breaks up, the energy level is over the top, and not just because of the sugar rush. The Chrome team is close to unleashing the product that Google was destined to create. First, though, there are five bugs to swat.

Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) also writes about Jay Walker's in the October issue of Wired.

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Jack Flack is normally quite suspicious when a supposedly accidental leak leads to wide, mostly positive coverage. Particularly about a new product. And particularly on public holiday that ensures little competitive news on the business pages the next day.

But the Google leak felt like a genuine miscue, detected only because Kara Swisher's Weber apparently has a 3G card.

What makes it seem like a genuine mistake? Well, while the company moved quickly to confirm the reports, it was not prepared to make the new browser downloadable, thus squandering the full benefit of the coverage.

The launch confirms that the war for the supremacy in the next tech era is fully on. Just as Microsoft cannot afford to have Google operate virtually uncontested in search, nor can Google afford to have Microsoft operate virtually uncontested in browers.

Here's the parse.

Google: At Google, we have a saying: "launch early and iterate."

Translation: Outside Google, it's sometimes misheard as "launch early and dominate."

Google: While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well!

Translation: Heh, heh, heh. Even our mailroom guys are go-getters.

Google: As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome.