CES 2019 Overview

I'm tired. But I am here for the two thousand nineteen c e S, the Consumer Electronics Show, which is the largest consumer electronics industry show, at least in North America, and it's been going on for decades. This is my tenth time attending c e S, although I did take a year off last year. Nowise it would have been in my eleventh time. And this show is enormous. It doesn't take place in just one spot in Las Vegas,

Nevada anymore. It it covers lots of different grounds. So there are exhibitors at the Sands Expo Center, which is next to the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas. There are all three of the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center are filled up with exhibitors, and they're more in other locations as well throughout the city, including some places like hotel suites and stuff where there are companies that have rented out a suite and they did so in

order to kind of have maybe a quieter experience. A lot of the high end audio exhibitors will do that

so that they're not competing in a noisy space. In other cases, it's because exhibition space might be really expensive and trying to compete with everybody else isn't terribly attractive, so some companies will run out as suite and try and get people to come to the suite to go check it out, although that's always difficult if you plan on seeing a lot of stuff each day, because it means leaving the main areas in order for you to go check out something else, and getting around in Las

Vegas can take some time. Like you know, you might think, oh, well that that will just be twenty minutes out of my way, and it turns out it's an hour and a half and you lose that time. And the show

floor is only open a certain number of hours each day. Today, as I record, this is the first day that the actual show floor will be open to the public, the public that is that have bought badges for c e S. And it doesn't open until ten am UH Pacific time, And as I record this, it is nine twenty a m. Pacific time, so I have not actually been on the exhibit floor space yet, but the press day has already happened.

A couple of big press events have already happened where companies have tried to get a kind of a head start and try to get their stuff seen before being lost in the cacophony of the general chaos that is c e S. And a lot of the bigger news outlets out there, like Wired and Gadget, the Verge c Net, they're already starting their coverage of the showroom floor because

they get early access. So today I thought I would give an overview of some of the stuff that is happening at c e S and and give an idea of the trends that we're seeing. I will probably record more after I get a chance to walk some of those floor myself. Granted, I'm gonna have to pick either the convention Center or the sands today because you can't really do both. In the same day, so I'll probably do the sands today. That's where you get a lot

of your startups, your smaller companies. Uh, you're Eureka Park is there. That's the one that's known for like some of the more ambitious startup ideas. Uh. And then in the convention center you tend to have the larger established companies, companies like Intel, Sony, you know, Samsung, that kind of stuff they're they're in the convention center and you can see neat stuff in both. But uh, I am going to give several caveats to this. First of all, because

the show is so huge and I am one person. Uh, there's a ton of stuff I haven't even seen or heard of yet, I'm sure. And even if I spent every hour that the show is actually open, walking through that floor space and looking everywhere I can and never stopping, I still wouldn't see everything. There's just too much here. The show is too big for any one person to see everything. Even if you were only trying to hit the high spots, you probably wouldn't see all of them

because they're spread out pretty far. And again, just getting from point A to point B can take quite some time, so This is going to be as a mile high overview of the two thousand nineteen show. And before I get to some of the stuff that was going on, one of the things I need to talk about is not so much technological nature, but political in nature, and it's because it has a direct impact on the show. You can't get around it. So in the United States

currently we have a partial government shutdown. In other words, the government right now, many departments within the government are currently unfunded. They have no money to run, so they are they're shut off, and the workers aren't working their furloughed essentially without pay. So this has had its effect

on c e S in several ways. One of those is that there were a lot of US government officials who originally were supposed to attend c e S and be part of various presentations and panel discussions, and now they're not because there you know, their their departments are shut down, so they don't even have the budgets to

travel to places, so they've all canceled their presentations. That includes people like a Jitpi, the FCC chairman, and Brendan Carr also of the f C, C Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Slaughter both of the f TC and the Federal Trade Commission, and Brandon Bray and Barnes Johnson of the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. So there were a lot of like important people in the US government who were meant to come out and have these conversations about

technology who can't. Now it really means that there's a missed opportunity for interaction between consumer tech companies and US government agents in a publicized setting to kind of create a public message of what the current strategy is for developing consumer tech and its role in the lives of everyday American people, as well as the future of America, the future of American industry. All those are very important messages that kind of gut pushed to the side because

of this government shutdown. More than that, in the United States, every electronic device that emits radio frequencies has to receive certification from the f c C upon moving that this device can operate within safe parameters in those radio frequency emissions. And a lot of companies are debuting brand new technology at c e s and with the government shut down,

the fcc cannot do this important step. They they can't go through the certification process, which means in the United States, these devices are effectively in limbo until the government is funded again. So that has a very real impact on these companies. And also the shutdown has affected travel across the United States. T s A employees the Security Agency. They're not being paid, so a lot of people are calling out sick because they need to work other jobs

in order to make ends meet. So they're they're not necessarily really sick, but they're calling out sick in order to go work other jobs and actually make some money because otherwise they have to work without pay. And uh, it's it's a critical role that they fell to help ensure safety or at least, if you're very kunicle, put on security theater. But either way, it's getting harder and harder for that too, uh to happen because they're not

getting any salary. So that's also had a big impact, not just on the tech companies obviously, but anyone traveling to come to this show. But that's the government shut down and how it's impacting the world right now, in the United States or the world, the I guess the world because ce S is a global event. You have companies from all over the world here at the conference and attendees from all over the world as well, but

specifically affecting the United States. Moving on to what's actually going on and being shown off here at the event, Well, there are always some broad trends that seem to emerge during c e S. For example, uh Am, I very first ce S eleven years ago. The theme I remember the most were widgets, these little web based widgets that were on everything, like kind of like many apps, things

like weather widgets or news ticker widgets. Primarily they were popping up on televisions, but they also would show up on things like kitchen appliances like refrigerators or stoves, and widgets gradually evolved into more holistic and useful interfaces for smart devices, more like the operating systems you would find

on a tablet or smartphone. Another big theme back when I first started going to see e S was three D television, which was pushed really hard for several years, and the industry is largely backed away from that over the last maybe five six years. They received the loud and clear message that the consumer tech market out there just doesn't really care. They're not interested in three D television's so what sort of big themes emerged this year.

Well some of them are the same ones that have been around for years, new versions of technology that we've had for ages. And this isn't me slagging off on the conference or on the companies at this conference. The purpose of c e S ultimately is for these companies to connect with retailers and with other companies, because some of these companies are business to business companies, right like Intel.

Intel does most of its business working with other companies, having their these other companies by the processors from Intel to incorporate into other products. That's the real reason for CEES that often people like myself, people of the media tend to forget, so to a lesser extent, ce S is an opportunity for these companies to connect with the

press and to get some publicity for their stuff. But largely it's for them to talk to other business folks about you know, carrying products and stores things like that. They're talking about emerging lineups of products, and not every new product is going to be a groundbreaking piece of technology that breaks the mold and defines a new type of gadget. There's going to be countless new laptops bluetooth speakers, computer peripherals, headphone owns, kitchen gadgets, smart locks, and every

other type of consumer electronic gadget you can imagine. They this isn't exactly the stuff that tends to get reporters salivating about covering the products, right Like a reporter who's been doing CS for a while might look at these things and just to go like, great, another computer. But at the same time, we wouldn't expect companies to just keep selling the same old model of gadget year after year. Of course, they're going to come out with new ones

that are maybe faster, more power efficient. They legitimately have added value, but it may not be sexy enough for the press to really get excited about it. So I'm not going to cover all of that. That would take thirty episodes about c e s about minute changes in some technologies. So what are some of the more innovative trends that are emerging. Well, artificial intelligence is a huge one, and this is a tough theme to talk about because people use the term AI so loosely and in connection

with all sorts of different concepts. Right, Like, artificial intelligence is pretty much everything until you say it's not. Uh. Some people refer to artificial intelligence in the sense of machines that seemingly think like people. Others use it in a more general way to talk about machines that are capable of making certain choices based upon the parameters that were programmed into those machines to you know, weigh all the different elements in any given decision making process before

coming to a conclusion, that kind of thing. But we're really talking more about capabilities built into tech so that the tech can make some sort of choice on its own, or learn from user behavior, and to customize and experience based on user behavior. So along with that, we're seeing a continuation of a trend that really started to pick up steam a couple of years ago, which is integrated support for AI assistance, you know stuff Alexa and Google

Home and Syrie and that kind of thing. Um Google, which has a huge pop up building set up on the parking lot of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I saw the building, haven't been in it yet, has announced that Google Home support will be on one billion devices by the end of twenty nineteen. Most of those devices, however, the company has admitted, are going to be phones, but

there will be other devices as well. Meanwhile, security experts and consumer advocates continue to express concern about things like consumer privacy, security, transparent policies. More people are starting to worry about devices that always have an active microphone going right, whether it's a phone that's in their pocket, or maybe it's a smart speaker on a side table, maybe it's

your car. And even if you go to great measures to make sure that you don't have any of those products, that none of your products have an active microphone that could be potentially listening in on everything, categorizing all of your conversations, and building out a more and more detailed profile of your likes and dislikes. You can't be sure that all the places you visit don't have those things.

Like even if you're out in public and people have smartphones that have these assistance on them, it starts to make you really paranoid. But for good reason, because these companies have repeatedly had data issues, data security issues that

call them to question their practices. So that is a continuing conversation and one that I think has to be addressed through Like I said in my wish list, transparency, really good security measures all of that's incredibly important, and ultimately we need to start making some decisions about how okay are we at all this information being gathered. Even if companies are saying they're not gathering that info, you know, they're all I can take is some lines of bad code.

Even if it wasn't intentional, it could still happen. So we have to start saying, well, how how much of this do we want to trade off? Like, do we find the benefit of these technologies to be so compelling that we're willing to uh to deal with the fact that we're being recorded, or that are the things we say are being analyzed in a way that will affect

us later on? And Uh, I don't have the answer to that, mostly because I haven't seen the benefit being so so incredibly compelling that I find the trade off to be worthwhile. Anyway, Uh, that's going to be a continuing conversation. I think we'll see in twenty nineteen. Now related to AI was a new emphasis on robots, and robots have been a big part of CS for as long as I've been going, I mean ever since I started.

I've seen robots ranging from very primitive robots that are essentially just the equivalent of one of those toys that will move when sound is playing, so the robot is just kind of boogying down whenever music is in the area, all the way up to robots that can more in a more sophisticated way respond to questions and return useful information. Uh. I'm pretty sure the first year when I went was the first time I saw a Parrot drone. I want to say that was like when Parrot first showed off

their consumer quad copter. And uh, every year since there's been an army of new robots meant to do everything from clean your floors to sweep out your gutters to folding your clothes fresh aile of the wash. And we've seen several robots meant to interact directly with people over the years, but this year that seemed to be emphasized a little bit more than usual. So companies are talking more about designing robots specifically to work in human environments

and to have meaningful human robot interactions. Now, personally, I think this is a fascinating area of technology because it requires not just a deep knowledge about tech in gen role and robotics in particular, but also human psychology. You have to understand people to be able to design robots that can interact with people. And one of the challenges that is that our behavior as people are. Human behavior

can change when we encounter robots. That if we were to encounter another person, we might behave one way, but when we encounter a robot, we might behave a different way, and in turn, this can change the nature of that human robot interaction. So designing robots that are meant to seamlessly interact with people is incredibly challenging since it's kind of like an idea and quantum mechanics, right, there's that quantum mechanics principle that says you cannot observe a quantum

system without also affecting that system. In other words, you can't make a measurement without affecting the thing that you are measuring, which means your measurement is no longer an indication of what that thing was, it's now what that thing is because you measured it. It's this mind been

in concept. Well with human robot interactions. You can't really design a robot to work perfectly out of the gate because people are not likely to react to that robot in the way that you imagined when you started designing the robot. So this involves a lot of design and redesign work. You create a robot, you create the software for it to guide its interactions. You find out people are off put by the way the robot behaves, so then you have to go back and adjust the robots behavior.

And now you find out that people are reacting in a totally different way, and it's still not exactly what you had planned. So you have to start asking yourself questions, how do I guide the behavior to be more like the result I want? Or do I need to change

my expectations. This is a fascinating thing for me because it really shows that you have to go beyond just figuring out how to make stuff work, and then you have to figure out, well, how do we as people work, and how can we make stuff that works with us instead of against us or inspires us to work against it.

I hope that sometime this year I can have a specialist in human robot interactions on the show to talk about these concepts and these challenges, because I think it's a really interesting area of technology, something that that goes beyond uh. Like I said, the circuits and the tech also at CES. This is not a surprise. If you've been following the progress of the show over the last several years, I'm sure you would have expected this. We saw tons of driver less car concepts. Some of them

were practical demonstrations. Some of them were not truly driverless car practical demonstrations. I'll talk more about one of those in a bit, but there were tons in concept form. BMW introduced a concept called I Next, which is meant to go into an autonomous car itself. Is not an autonomous car. Instead, this is a mixed reality technology. Mixed reality is what we all that type of tech that kind of incorporates stuff like virtual reality and augmented reality.

So in this case, uh, it's a concept where you would have a car that could have at least some autonomous operations. Now, when the car takes over, then you could enact this I next platform. And it's a productivity platform and an entertainment system, so you could do things like look at your schedule, or watch television or have a video conference call, and you would see stuff projected

on the windshield as if it were just a regular display. Uh. This obviously would require the car to be controlling itself, or else you would have a terrible accident because you would have someone's head up here, like Marlon Brando's face and Superman, and I think that would scare me to see Marlon Brando in the windshield of my car. For

numerous reasons, his death being one of them. The BMW concept was shown off in virtual reality, so this was not a practical vehicle that they were putting people into, but rather a VR headset so that you could put it on. You'd have some controls at your disposal, so it'd be like you're driving a vehicle and you could go through the demo to see what it would be like to hand over control of the vehicle to the autonomous system and then engage the I next system. Now

I did not do this. I did not do this for two really big reasons. One is I don't drive. Actually, I get anxiety about driving. It's a it's a phobia, and it's something I've had to deal with. It is a terribly inconvenient phobia to have. Uh, it is socially embarrassing. I've talked about it a couple times on the show. But I've been dealing with this my whole life, and I just haven't gotten any better at it. So that's one reason I actually get anxiety. Even with the whole

virtual driving thing. I don't even like driving video games that much. Um, the more arcady they are, the better I am at it. But I didn't want to give myself anxiety just sitting down to do a simple maneuver in a VR car and have it hand over to an autonomous vehicle. And I know, I know this is goofy. I know I'm a dufas. I get it. You don't have to tell me. I'm very aware. But the other big reason is kind of practical, y'all. Because this is

a tech conference. There are hundreds of thousands of people here, or at least more than a hundred thousands of people here from all over the world. Some of those people are likely not entirely healthy right now. They probably have colds. That's cold flu season, so some of them are probably sick. Some of them, based upon what I have witnessed, failed

to wash their hands after going to the restroom. And yes, this is gross, and I hesitate to even say it, but I have seen this over and over again at c e s. When you know I'm standing at the in the men's room, I'm I'm washing my hands, and someone just walks from the inside of the restroom straight out the door without washing their hands, and I think

that is disgusting. Then I think I'm at a consumer electronics show where people pick things up and handle them and put them back down again for other people to handle. And you immediately think, I gotta wash my hands at every opportunity when I'm at this show. But then you think, I am definitely not putting on a VR headset that is not in my cards. Um. And I don't say that to gross anybody out, but rather too one to stress to my fellow conference goers. For goodness sakes, wash

your hands, Come on, people, just some hygiene here. And two for everyone else, think about stuff before you handle it and put it on your face and everything, because I don't want you to get sick. I want it to be a good conference for everybody, Okay. Also related to vehicles is the concept of connected technology within cars. So this is kind of like the Internet of Things concept,

and it goes beyond cars systems. Right, We've seen these this connected idea and all sorts of technology, but in car systems are one of those that get a lot of attention year over year, and this year is no exception that these systems have huge amounts of connected technology and them some of them are pretty cool, Like they have cameras that are inside the cabin of the car. I've already seen vehicles that do this, obviously. There have been several that have been on the market for a

couple of years. A friend of mine actually has a car that has a camera mounted on the rear view mirror so that if her eyes drift away from the space in front of her, her car gives her an alert saying, hey, put your eyes back on the road. So if she looks down at the radio, or if she were to look at her phone, she would get a notification from her car saying don't do that, or if she were to nod off, she would get a warning.

This is something that we're seeing in cars, but we're seeing even more of it now, Like there's aftermarket systems, their systems that are being designed for cars as soon as you get them right off the lot, and some of them are uh, pretty nifty stuff that we also see a lot of touch screen interfaces, a lot of app integration into cars. Navigation tools obviously been a big part of vehicle systems for a while. Now personal assistants, like I said, with Google Home and Alexa, all of

that incorporation is happening right into the vehicles. At this point, we've seen studies that prove that distractions can be as dangerous as driving while intoxicated, and that makes me a little concerned about all these features. I'm worried that they might have an impact on driver attention and focus. They're not supposed to. They're supposed to allow a driver to access all these things without diverting their attention from the road. But these are features that go beyond what you would

typically access in a car. Right, Like if I'm thinking about before we got to all these in car systems years and years ago. Let's say it's like the seventies. You had your radio, you might have an eight track player, and then you had your vehicle and that was it. Right. You didn't have navigation systems, you didn't have entertainment systems, you didn't have in dash information systems. You know, you had your your regular speedometer and things like that, but

you didn't have all this other stuff. So there were things that you could be distracted by, like if you kept on searching the radio to find station that was playing something you liked, but it was limited. These days, we've added in so many interesting features and toys that it makes me worried that it's pulling too much attention away from the road, which might mean that autonomous vehicle systems aren't a necessity anyway, because we're making it more

dangerous to drive a car. But um, the concept is supposed to be that it doesn't take your attention away. Maybe you're using voice activation for all of the different features,

which is fine if those features don't pull your attention away. Um. But as I see all these cool screens and really flashy displays and and interesting apps and all this stuff integrated into cars, I it just it starts to make me think more and more about the casinos I'm walking through, with all the slot machines and flashy lights and stuff. It just seems distracting to me. And again, it's hard for me to say if this is meaningful to any

actual driver, because I don't drive. I'm looking at this from an outsider perspective, so maybe again I'm making a big deal out of nothing. But it just doesn't sit well with me in every case. Now, there are some driver lists or some in in car connected systems that I think are pretty cool that maybe don't have that kind of factor to them, so I don't want to paint them all with the same brush. And there's also a related element of privacy and security issues with connected cars.

I mean, the more features you create that UH allow a car to access off the vehicle services, the more opportunities you have for someone to perhaps take advantage of that and hack your car, for example. But we've already seen examples of of car hacking even with limited in car systems, So I hope that security is something that is a first and foremost in the minds of the

designers who create these systems. I've got a lot more to say about what's going on at c E S two thousand nineteen, but before I get into all of that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright. I talked a lot about some of the broad trends that are going on. Let's talk about some specifics here. One of the big news items that that broke here at CES was really surprising to me, and I found out about it from my buddy I as actor. He works over at c net. He's a really smart guy

and is doing incredib will work. If you're not familiar with his work had seen it, I highly recommend you go check it out. I don't say that just because he's my friend. I say that because he does really good work. Anyway, he was telling me, Hey, you heard about airplay, right, I'm like, well, yeah, I know what airplay is. That's that's the Apple feature that allows you to stream content from iTunes to something like an Apple TV platform that then can connect to a television and

you can watch stuff from like iTunes. You know, you can send it via airplay. It's kind of similar to Chrome cast. That's Google's version. He says, no, no, no, no airplay too. You heard that more and more manufacturers are integrating airplay two directly into their their products, into

their television sets. This was news to me. We're talking about manufacturers like Samsung, Sony and l G and Samsung and Apple have not had the smoothest of relationships over the years, so that is big news because typically what Apple does is it likes to play within its own ecosis them it doesn't tend to like to incorporate its technology into someone else's products. It tends to like to create its own products and then you connect those to other people's technology. And I say it likes to as

if the Apple Company is its own sentient entity. As far as they know, it has not yet gained sentience. But now Apple's working with these other companies to support its airplay technology. So if you buy a Samsung or Sony or LG television with this feature, you will be able to use like an iPhone and stream stuff that you bought on iTunes directly to these televisions without having any other peripheral attached to it. You don't have to have an Apple TV hooked up to it or anything

like that. This is an interesting move because for years, probably for the better part of a decade, there have been a lot of rumors that Apple was developing its own television so that it could do this and again keep it all within the Apple ecosystem them so that yes, you could do the same thing, but it would all be an Apple product. The television itself would be made by Apple. This appears to say maybe they're backing off

from that. Maybe, and to be fair, the heads of the company have always been coy about whether or not they were going to come out with a television, and it may very well be that Apple has come to the conclusion that developing its own television to compete on the market against all these established manufacturers that have been making TVs for decades might not be the best business move, and so they're backing off instead and partnering with those

companies to incorporate this technology directly into their products. So yep, future TVs from major television companies will likely have airplay support, which is kind of neat if you use airplay. I don't, but it's only because I don't have any Apple gadgets. Um. I don't think it's I don't think it's a bad service at all. I just literally don't own anything that can do it. My wife has an iPhone. I guess she could do it, but you know, she doesn't let

me play with her phone for good reason. I mean, I'm a I'm not a responsible person. You can't put me in charge of an iPhone anyway. That was a big announcement that I found very surprising. One of the products that's getting a lot of buzz, and I've seen videos of it, but I have not actually seen it in action yet. I hope I can swing by the booth and maybe see a demo of it. Is the LG Roll Up Television. Uh. It's going on sale in twenty nineteen. Sale is probably the wrong word. It's going

for a premium price in twenty nineteen. And it's an oh led screen and it rolls up like a window shade. So if you remember those old window shades where, especially like in cartoons and stuff, you pull it down and then to pull it back up, you just you give it a little tug and then it activates a spring and the whole thing rolls back up. It's kind of like that, but much slower and and measured because you

don't want to break a incredibly expensive television set. The version that LG showed off is a four K resolution screen sixty inches across the diagonal, so pretty big screen, larger than my television at home. It has a one what Dolby Atmos speaker in the base. The base looks kind of like a like a cardenza. It's like a like a cabinet almost, and so it folds down or rolls down into this basse and when the screen is

all the way down. A cover slides on top, and so it looks like a little piece of furniture, and then you activate it and the cover slides back and the television can extend back up. You can actually even extend it just a quarter of the way if you like, and use it as a music player, and it will it will show like the title of the song and the basic controls and everything, um, and so then it becomes like a weird little soundbar um. And it's super

neat looking. Also, it has airplay to support, so it's one of those TVs I was just talking about a second ago. It also was going to have Google Home and uh An Alexa support, so you'll be able to use the assistance in that case with these TVs. So it's super high tech and it's getting, like I said, a lot of buzz. A lot of people really like this, and I like the videos I saw of it, But as I said, I have not yet set eyes upon it in person. I hope to do that, probably not today.

I think today I'm going to the Sands, which is the like I said, the Eureka Park area with all the startups and stuff, and then tomorrow I'll hit the convention center. Rollable and foldable oh LED screens are showing up in other places too. We've actually seen some foldable displays for several years, but they were always in the prototype phase. It wasn't meant to be a consumer product, but rather here's what the future can hold kind of stuff.

So we're now starting to see it rolled out into actual products, including one that is already on the market in China. That's from Royal r O y O l E. They are mostly known for their playze Uh. They did a cinematic like a personal cinematic display, essentially a headset that allows you to watch movies. They had that on on display a few years ago. Now they have a flexible sort of tablet slash phone kind of thing called flex pie f l e x p a i UH, and as I said, it's already on sale in China.

So when it's unfolded, it's like an eight inch screen but you folded in half and it has a specific area where the the bezel allows for the folding and you can turn it into a phone. When it's folded, it looks pretty thick, especially right where the bend is. It looks a little bulky to me. I haven't had my hands on this either. I've only watched videos of

this as well. Uh So, I don't know how well it works as a phone, but the screen is gorgeous and the fact that it does bend and it still, you know, is a perfect display on both sides is really nifty looking. Uh. I hear that some of its features are a little low tech, like the camera I understand is not particularly good on it, but it's still for an early technology, pretty impressive. Also. I mentioned VR in a demonstration earlier that was just meant to demonstrate

a different technology, but VR itself is still a thing. Um. It's one of those technologies that we've been waiting to see breakout for a while or just fizzle away, kind of like it did in the nineties. And like the nineties, I think we're seeing the same sort of reaction where people are starting to feel like the promise of VR doesn't quite um like the like the reality of VR

doesn't measure up to what the promises. So anyway, we're still seeing some interesting VR tech shown off at the e s HTC showed off a new Vibe Pro headset that has eye tracking support it's called the Vibe pro I, So you can use your eyes to navigate menus and

control interfaces and that kind of thing. Um. So you might have choices displayed in front of your eyes, and when you stare at a specific choice for a certain amount of time, it's alex It that kind of thing, And so you can navigate through menus, you can, you know, have game developers develop games where specifically your eyes are the control It's kind of neat um. They also introduced a new user interface design called the Vibe Reality System.

So previously, the menu screens that you would encounter in the Vibe were pretty much like PC type menu screens, flat two dimensional screens that kind of takes you out of the immersed feeling you would get in virtual reality. The new system creates a more three dimensional approach to redesigning menus and transitions and stuff, so that way it's more like you're navigating through a virtual world to make your choices, as opposed to just looking at a screen.

They also introduced a new headset called the Vibe Cosmos that's meant to be easier to set up and to use, and that way it removes one of the perceived barriers of virtual reality. I would say that the two big barriers to adoption. One is that it is fairly complicated technology that tends to require multiple pieces like a computer, cables, power chords, you know, the headset, all the controllers, all this kind of stuff. So this is meant to cut

down on that. And the other would be the price that it costs a lot just to buy the equipment and then to have a decent computer that can also run all the software that also adds to the cost. So Vibe Cosmos is meant to be kind of an answer to both of those. Um I am curious to see if they are able to really make that compelling, because then the question is do you trade off the experience to such a degree that people don't know. Yes, it's more affordable and easier to use, but people don't

care because it's not particularly fun or interesting. That's a possibility, and I don't know the answer to that. Allow of that depends upon the developers who create the software for the hardware. Intel showed off the ninth generation of its current processors, now with elements measuring in the ten nanometer range, which blows my mind. It's way smaller than I ever thought we would manage to get and still be able to cope with quantum effects, and yet here we are.

It's one of those reasons why despite the fact that we keep on saying Moore's long is going to have to come to an end soon, somehow people keep finding

a way to push that further off into the future. Uh, these processors are able to pack more power than previous models, and the company also showed off a new microprocessor architecture and motherboard design that they called lake Field, and that builds out the processor into three dimensions that couples various elements together very tightly to decrease the amount of time and energy it takes for data to travel between these

various components. Now, the Intel says that the result is that this family of processors are faster, they're more powerful, and they're more power efficient than any of their predecessors. And the demonstrations the company held were atty impressive. But again, I haven't seen it in action yet. I'll see that when I go to the convention center, because in tells one of the largest booths over in the central hall

of the Las Vegas Convention Center. They also revealed that through a partnership they have with Ali Baba, they're creating a three D athlete tracking system for the next Summer Olympics, and they'll be able to use video cameras and this software to analyze athletes movements and quantify athletic performance in

a really crazy granular way. So if you want to know precisely what angle a shot put thrower chose when he or she set a world record, that system will grab that information for you, will tell you tons of quantifiable information about every single aspect of an athletic athletes

performance during the Olympics. UM, I'm not sure if that information will ever come a cross as being anything more than just interesting from a curiosity standpoint, Like I don't know that it would necessarily ever become informative or helpful or educational for anybody. Like it's it's one thing to know that someone threw a shot put at a specific angle. It's another thing to be able to replicate that precisely.

Like if you told me, oh, you just need to stand at a thirty seven degree angle to the ground in order for this thing to happen, Well, first I'd say, there's that's impossible. I don't have the calf's strength to hold myself at a thirty seven degree angle. But I'd also say I don't know how to process that in

a way to actually do anything about it. Until also talked about five G. Five G is going to be one of those buzzwords that gets a ton of coverage here at c E S. That's the upcoming new wireless data transfer standard that will allow for much, much faster wireless data networks. So they talked about working with that on a chip code named snow Ridge, which will help handle processes that are running on five G two optimize them so that you're getting the absolute most out of

your connection. Uh, then we can move over to Samsung. They showed off five G smartphone designs, so they also talked about five G quite a bit that they talked. Showed off a ninety eight in eight K television. I'll never mind that there's no eight K content out there.

In fact, in the presentation they say, when eight K content becomes available, So this is a television that literally is able to display resolutions higher than what anyone has generated for content that you can watch at home, eight K will come along. But I I've talked about resolution before on tech stuff and my own personal experience with high definition two K and eight K and four K

and all that kind of stuff. I have to say from experience, once you get to a certain level of of resolution, let's i mean, even HD to two K isn't at that big of a jump unless you're talking about an enormous screen and you're sitting really close. But two K, I would say, I could tell there's a difference between two K and HD if both all other settings are as equal as they possibly can be. Because remember, the quality of a picture you see on a television

is not just up to the resolution. There's color representation, brightness, contrast, there are all these other things that are important with the quality of a picture. So you could have an HD set and a two K set, and if you were really good at tweaking all the settings for the h D set, and you were really bad at tweaking all the settings for the two K set, the h

D might actually look better. But if all things are equal, then I might be able to tell a little difference between two K and HD, But I probably wouldn't be able to tell much difference between two K and say four K or eight K and that is. I don't that that could just be my own physical limitations. As Jonathan Strickland, you know, humans are different. Some humans have better vision than others. My vision is not the best obviously, so it may very well be that for someone else

there is a definitive difference. They can they can see that there is a difference between the resolutions. For me, not so much like if I if I'm not told which set is eight K versus you know, four K or two K, then I'm not likely to be able

to pick them out other than if one is just ginormous. Still, Samsung showed off their ninety eight K television and they said that eight K screens are coming out in the spring of twenty nineteen, so we're gonna start seeing eight K sets, which does mean that the UH lower ultra high definition resolution television sets will get cheaper. So I'm all for it, uh because I don't have one yet. Again, I don't know that it would even matter. Samsung also

talked about family Hub and Bixby. Family Hub is sort of their Internet of Things platform, and Bixby is their personal assistant essentially, and they have a fridge that will send you a notification on your phone if you leave the door open to the fridge, so you know that's something. And then they talked about their PCs. They talked about their InCAR systems falling in line with some of those

trends I mentioned earlier. The in car system includes cameras like I talked about, but these cameras actually have facial recognition. So it's not just that they can tell if you're not looking at the windscreen when you're driving or the road when you're driving. They can actually tell who you are. There's facial recognition technology incorporated with the camera system, so the car technically quote unquote knows who is driving and

who's a passenger in the car. And this means that each person can have his or her own profile with the vehicle, with their own preferences, and that the car, when they detect who's driving, can toomatically enable those preferences.

So let's say that you have specific settings, like you want the car seat to be a specific distance away from the steering wheel, you like a particular range of radio stations, maybe you like a particular temperature, Maybe you really like the car seat heater to be on on cold days. That kind of stuff when you get in, this car recognizes it's you and sets all those things to your preferences automatically. But then maybe your your spouse, or your kid, or your parent or your friend gets

behind the wheel. They also have a profile with your car. Then the car will automatically adjust to their preferences if they have been established, which I think is kind of neat. It's also kind of creepy. Um And again it raises questions about data privacy and security. You want to make sure that all of those preferences are kept pretty much,

you know, between you and the car. You don't necessarily want companies to know all the things that all of your peculiarities, the things that make you you um there. There's gonna probably be some point where you're thinking, Yeah, companies just don't need to know that. They don't need to know that I sing along with Taylor Swift whenever she comes on the radio. And I'm not saying that I do, but I'm not saying that I don't anyway. Samsung also unveiled a line of robot products, including a

robot that can take your vital signs. You can put your finger on its screen and it will measure your blood flow and blood pressure. He'll tell you how healthy you are or not, I guess. And it can also do stuff like play soothing music if you're totally stressed

out by having a robot in your home. Maybe. IBM showed off it's Q system quantum computer, which is the twenty cubit system that the company developed and now offers up as a cloud based platform, and I talked about this when I went to the IBM Sink conference last year. They showed it off a little bit more this year.

It's the e s The really important thing about this platform, I think is that we should keep in mind this is not meant to be the ground bake breaking machine that's going to help scientific researchers find new discoveries and and breakthrough barriers that have previously been up in front of them. It's more like a stepping stone towards that goal because twenty cubits that's sufficient for some small applications, but it's not really at a level that's going to

be transformative, I don't think. However. What it does do is it gives developers the chance to actually explore how the quantum system works and figure out the best way to leverage that. So, in other words, how to program software that can take advantage of this quantum computing system Without knowing how to build out the software, then it just ends up being a really impressive machine that doesn't

really do anything right. The real potential of computers isn't just in their horsepower, but what we do with it the software that we create four of those computers. So that's kind of what this platform is going to allow people to do, is to ask questions like, how can we design something that could be really useful with this

new method of computing. And as we start to develop those practices, when we begin to make bigger, more powerful quantum computing systems, will be able to take better advantage of them, and then we hit those hopefully amazing breakthroughs that we've been thinking about all this time. So it's not like the the end of encryption is right around the corner, but we can see the end of it off in the distance. On the PC side, most of the changes and features were evolutionary, not revolutionary. Not a

big surprise. A lot of the laptops I've seen so far have sported really thin bezels, for example, that's become kind of the new trend in the last couple of years, and we're starting to see manufacturers talk about five G integration so that there will be native support when that technology is ready. But generally speaking, I haven't seen a

whole lot of truly like wild wacky stuff. For several years, there have been tons of personal transportation devices on display, things like you know, stuff like that that's in the range of segue right, the hoverboards, the segue like material, or gadgets rather things like that, electric skateboards, pedal assist bikes. These have all been part of CS for ages. But one thing I found really inspiring was a demonstration of the one wheel x R plus um personal transportation device.

It's it looks like a balance board with a wheel in the middle, so kind of you know, you've got that one wheel in the center, and you've got the the board you stand on on either side of the wheel. Derek Ross gave a demonstration and it was pretty remarkable because Mr Ross lost a leg in Afghanistan after a bomb exploded, so he has a prosthetic leg, but he

also uses the one wheel device. He's able to get on this thing and wheel around like it's a natural way of traveling around his environment, and the way he was really able to do this is through firmware on the one wheel that is a code named Gemini allows each user to customize their experience, so you can make sure that the devices responding to you exactly the way you wanted to, so you don't have to necessarily just

learn how it works. You can teach it to work with you, which again that's sort of like the big goal of machine learning in general, is that we take away the necessity for us to learn how the machines work, and we teach the machines how we work, and then the machines help us work better. So Ross uses this to glide around his home even though he has a

prosthetic leg, which I think is pretty inspirational. When we come back, I'm going to talk about some of the wacky, weird fun stuff that I've seen or have heard of so far at c E S and uh there's some there's some weird ones on there, so stick with me. I'm going to take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So one of the weird things that we saw here at CES this year is is a camera called baby Eyes or babies Um it's a camera you mount on

your baby, because that's where we are now. It's a it's kind of a camera on a sticker actually, and you put the sticker on your baby and this camera can record for two hours on a single charge, and then you offload the video onto another device like a computer, and it comes with some software, and the software has facial recognition abilities, so it can start pulling out all the video that happens to have people's faces in it, so you know, you skip all the stuff where there's

no one in the frame, and your baby is just not pointed at anything in particular. So I guess when you do point your baby at someone, thinking of the baby is almost like a tripod. Uh. Then the camera software knows that there was a person there. And in the future you're supposed to be able to search through the collective video footage for specific people, and according to the company, you could even search according to specific moods.

This was one of those really quirky things to make it to c e s that got some early coverage because it wasn't exactly like everything else that's already out there. Speaking of cameras, Valio that's a company that often works with autonomous car developers create a system called the Extra View trailer. So imagine you're towing a trailer behind your vehicle.

So you've got a trailer behind you. Now imagine that both your vehicle and the trailer itself have rear mounted cameras on them that can capture video footage of everything behind them. Now imagine that the forward surface of that trailer, the surface that's actually facing the back windshield of your vehicle, is really a video screen and it's got a live

feed from those cameras. So when you look in your rear view mirror, instead of seeing a trailer, you see a screen that is displaying a video feed of whatever is behind it. It's like the video screen is almost like a cloaking device for the trailer. The trailer has gone invisible and you can see through it. That's the effect.

It's supposed to help drivers change lanes and park more safely because they can see what is behind their trailer and they can have a greater awareness of their surroundings. I thought that was pretty cool. Hyundai also showed off a concept vehicle called Elevate, or the Ultimate Mobility Vehicle. You need to look at pictures of this thing. I don't think this is ever going to see production. It is a concept, not not an actual vehicle that you

can get in. But it is nifty because, in addition to the wheels that you would expect to find on a car, you know, typical car features are wheels, this thing has legs. So the legs can extend down and now it can go from wheeled mode into legged mode, and then it can climb over terrain that wheels would have trouble getting over. Now, details about this concept are pretty scared or probably because it is just so darned conceptual.

But one of the things that Hyundai was isn't saying is whether this is a driver controlled vehicle or an autonomous vehicle. But it is worth pointing out that robotic legs are really hard to get right. Boston Dynamics has spent years working on the kinks to just basic robotic leg motion. You know, they had countless experiments with one legged robots hopping in a circle trying to get it just right. The wheel has been a go to for a lot of vehicles and robots because it's orders of

magnitude easier to operate than a leg. You know, legs have to contend with things like balance, shifting of gravity, like it's gravitational center, that kind of thing, pressure, and it has to deal with these things in the ways that wheels just don't. So it's tough to do. I would imagine it would have to be autonomous, but it was a really nifty concept. Mercedes Benz showed off another concept called the Urbanetic. It's sort of like a minivan pod type thing that you would get in. There's no

no no driver controls or anything. It's The interior is a couple of seats or or like almost like benches that all face inward and has a nice skylight you can see out into the Vegas skyline. Uh. And it looks like it's an autonomous taxi or autonomous vehicle delivery vehicle, but it's not truly autonomous, at least not the version shown off at CS. It was actually driven remotely by human operator. But the concept is for an autonomous vehicle and what such a vehicle would be like in the future.

So you would sit in this nice, large, kind of funky design, UH vehicle. I didn't get a chance to write in it because the line was super long, and also I don't even know if my badge would let me, Like, I don't know if I have the level of of notoriety and importance to be able to get in such a vehicle. But look neat, let's see. Uh, there's the ob spot. That's a four K camera that has AI functionality build into it so it can follow the subject

as the subject moves around the environment. So the camera stationary has a base uh that the camera sits on. The camera itself is connected to an arm that's on a gimbal, so it has three axes of rotation, and so the camera can pan up and down, left and right. You know, I can do some tilt and um or rotate. And you set up the camera. You use just your

controls to indicate to the camera follow me. I am the person that needs to be the focus of this video, and the camera will automatically track you, so as you move around the environment, the camera will turn and continue to keep its focus on you. It also has a twelve megapixel resolution and a three point five times optical zoom, so not a digital zoom. It actually has an optical zoom. It's using lenses and distance to create the zooming feature

and there are other gesture controls. If you hold up your palm, that's what tells it to follow you, but you can also hold up a piece sign that would tell it to zoom in. Uh. The camera'slaunching on Kickstarter and may even the Kickstar may even be up and running by the time you hear this podcast and from why I understand. The camera has a price tag of four fifty dollars, so it's not cheap, but it does

look pretty nifty. Uh. There's a company called Bell formally Bell Helicopter that showed off a concept called the Bell Nexus here at c e S. It's a flying taxi type thing. It looks kind of like a really large version of a consumer drone, you know, like a quad copter, except this one has six ducted fans, not four, and they can rotate to provide lift and thrust, so it's

like a v T O L vehicle. The company has partnered with Uber and they plan to have an air taxi service launch figuratively and literally sometime in the twenty twenties. So according to Bell, this concept could hold up to five people and it has a weight capacity of six hundred pounds, so it's not gonna be carting around the starting lineup of a hockey team or anything that'd be

too heavy. But if all goes as planned, within a decade, we're gonna have flying taxis taking us places, assuming that they are proven to be safe and we figure out how the heck to create regulations for such a thing. This is gonna be another one of those in the cases where technology and the law are not in alignment. Have a feeling that the law is going to have

to catch up quickly to this kind of tech. Finally, for this episode, I mean, there's tons more I can talk about, but I've been going super long already, and this is like an old school tech stuff episode. Harley Davidson showed off its first all electric motorcycle here at c E S. It's going to be available for purchase later in twenty nineteen for the princely sum of twenty nine thousand seven dollars. One of the most expensive electric motorbikes I've heard of, In fact, it might be the

most expensive one I've seen. It can go from zero to sixty miles per hour in just three and a half seconds, and according to the company, well I actually produce a quote new signature Harley Davidson sound end quote as you accelerate because you know it's electric, so otherwise it would be completely silent when it was gearing up. But now, and you don't have to worry about switching

gears either because it's an electric motor. But now it's going to have a electronically generated sound so that you still get that feel of the Harley rumble. I imagine. I really hope to get a chance to look at that in person. I'm sure that's at the North Hall. It's where most of the cars and vehicle stuff as here at the at c e S. It's sowhere at the Las Vegas Convention Center, So hopefully tomorrow I'll get a chance to see that. All right, Well, that is

our overview of C E S two thousand nineteen. I'm gonna get out of here. I'm gonna send this off to my wonder producer, Tari, and hopefully she'll be able to get this up and running soon, whereas I will be wandering the halls of c E S trying to see if there's anything else interesting to talk about in future episodes. So you, guys, I hope you've had a great new year so far. I look forward to hearing

from you guys. If you have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, whether it's a company technology, maybe there's someone in tech I should focus on. Let me know. Send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter tech Stuff hs W at both of those, go to our website that's tech Stuff Podcast dot com and you can check out the archives and find out

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