TechStuff Visits CES 2013: Part 2

that have to do with technology everything? As it turns out, well, first of all, the trend of creating fitness tech has not slowed down at all. I saw lots and lots of examples of various gadgets that will track how many steps you take and upload that data in some way or or or analyze your activity in various ways to let you know exactly how active or not active are. Yeah, you know which, which is really cool and I think

a lot of people are. If my Facebook feed is any indication using that kind of thing to um to just kind of crowdsource their their own ability to to level up in health. That's the nerdiest thing that I've said in a very long time. And I'm podcasting about tech things right now, so that's really impressive. But but no, you know, it's it's it's a great motivation to be able to connect with other people share that sort of Yeah.

I've seen people who use things like like the fitbit as a means of competing against their friends, where you know, how many they see how many steps they log, and then they see how many of their steps their friend logs. They're like, oh, I need to fit another fift steps so that I could beat them. And you know, in the end, we're talking about activity and exercise and a healthier lifestyle. So even though there might be some sort of goofy competitive edge on one side, yeah, the the

outcome is fantastic. I heard that fit that actually had a new piece of tech called the Fitbit Flex Activity Track or bracelet that you basically just wear all the time and very pretty, it's very pretty. Uum in the United States, it's on sale for pre order for Yeah, so it's we're talking a hundred dollars. But it does track all this information and then you can actually view it through various apps or programs and get more of an insight into what your activity levels mean for your

general health. And this means that you can use that information to try and adopt a healthier lifestyle, or you know, maybe you realize like, um, I need to make more time in my day for this sort of thing because it is important to me in order to have a happier life experience. I mean, the healthier we are in general, we tend to be happier. That is actually a science fact that has been proven that that healthier people are happier.

It's better quality of life. Yeah, poor health means higher stress levels, which in turn leads to more poor health. It's a terrible, terrible cycle. And we've got to get out of that. So uh so we have terrible cycles. No, No, I saw I saw a lot of exercise equipment. But one of the things I saw was kind of interesting. Um it was actually I think it was up for

one of the c E S Innovation Awards. It was a thing that you would attach to a stationary exercise bike that will allow you to control the bike's um uh pressure and everything so that you know you would have greater resistance. You can control it from a smartphone. So in other words, you think like I want to go up a hill now, and on your smartphone, which is already playing your music, you just go ahead and adjustice a little thing and suddenly you're you're now. I

don't know how necessary that is. I guess it depends upon what kind of stationary bike you're writing. But I thought it was an interesting use of health technology. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. The big one that I heard about was the rp VITA by I Robot and in Touch, which um it stands for Remote Presence, Virtual and Independent

Telemedicine Assistant, which means that it's a hospital butler essentially. Yeah, it's it's a it's jarvis or the spittle and um, let's see, let's see you telecommunicate with your doctor if he's in a remote he or she. I'm sorry, that was terrible and met the worst feminist. Um if you're pretty bad too. If you're if your doctor is in is in a remote location, Um, you can you can see them. You can plug your your ultrasound or whatever other equipment into this thing, and it will send all

of your biomedical statistics over there. Really great for emergency situations and things like some remote locations where getting a doctor there might not be uh might not be easy to do, but a doctor could take a look at that that data and find out like oh no, we we really do need to send medical help there. Or they could say this is something that you can treat on your own, or perhaps even say this is something you can do until we can get help to you.

It's it's really a cool way of using technology to help people. Um. There was one other one I wanted to talk about in this area which kind of relates back to the sport stuff in a way. Um, and it was Belkan had what was called the Wemo Baby Monitor. Now, Wem is a technology that they've used for things like home automation and smartphone control. You know you were talking

about controlling everything from your smartphone. A lot of the Wemo technology is all about that, things like controlling lights from your phone, things like that. Well, the Wemo Baby monitor, uh is a device that has a crying algorithm as an algorithm that's designed to pick up sound and distinguish one sound from another, and it's specifically meant to alert you when your baby cries. So when your baby cries, you get a message on your phone saying, hey, baby

is not happy. You might want to go check on baby. But if if a big truck goes by and the noise is loud, enough to hear inside the house. The monitor doesn't send you a false positive saying babies crying. It also does not send you a message saying a big truck just went by. That's get a little bit ted and be like, wow, I'm getting a lot of

data about the noise is coming from baby's room. But the other thing that this this device does is through a partnership with a piece of software called evo uh, it tracks the information about your baby's crying habits and

sleep patterns. So it actually plots this information so that parents can see when their baby is crying, when their baby is sleeping, and perhaps if they see that the baby is crying at a consistent time each day, maybe they change the feeding schedule, or maybe it might be there there's some other environmental factor that is based upon time that they can look into to make their baby a happier baby. So the idea is that to use this data in a way to become a better parent.

And it's the reason why I say it reminds me of the fitness information is because a lot of this the fitness gear is all about tracking your activity and then relating that information to you in a in a way that is meaning, right, and that's what when we talk about the Internet of things. That's a big element

of the Internet of things. It's this idea that we're going to incorporate not just connectivity to the Internet, but the ability for various stuff to sense what is going on in our environment and send us information that we can understand so that we might improve that environment, right, improve the environment, or improve our own interaction within that environment. Now that being said, there's always the opportunity for us to obsess over this data in ways that you know,

they didn't necessarily intend. But that's a human thing. Yeah, yeah, well you know, it's all a tiny bit creepy, a little bit big brother here and there. Yeah, I get a little bit weirded out by by the things around me watching me, and I don't. It all depends on where the data is going to. Well, absolutely, Like if the data is just coming straight to you, then you're

just like, you start to micromanage your own behavior. But if the data is going to someone else first, then you're like, oh, great, now they know they're going to know everything. Yeah, they know how many times I go to the refrigerator and open the door and not actually get anything out but just stare and then closed the door and walk away. That's you know, and then they're gonna send me an email about how wasteful I am. But but hopefully no one, no one is bored enough

to watch and judge that data fingers crossed. I don't know. I met some interesting people at see anyway. Yeah, so that's that's health technology. Um. We also had a lot of car technology. Now, some of that was things like various new kinds of car stereos, which you know, even

louder and more basier than before. But I mean that has a place, right, but it's not something that that I mean, unless you write about specifically about about cars sound systems, it's not terribly interesting to a general to the average consumer. The really interesting thing that I saw was audis self driving. Lexus also had a car that was practically self driving. It had this is technology that

we've seen developed and implemented in two cars. It's just on a level that goes beyond what we norm see

in the consumer marketplace. So things like lane change software that helps you change lane safely, or collision detection or automatic breaking or uh, you know, the parking assist features right right, parking assist being where um, you know, if you have your car parked and it has to be a specialized garage outfitted with this array of laser scanners so that your car knows where it is, but you can you can then, like Batman, just just press a button on your smartphone and call your car to you

and it will just drive up from the garage and the Joker will attack Gotham and you have to be on your way to save the world. Yeah, like a boss, as as my buddy say. Yeah. Both both Lexus and Audi were showing off some features of this, and uh, Toyota has been really really active in developing self driving cars.

That news broke just as CES was starting. There was news about this Toyota self driving car prototype, and it's really there's a lot of excitement around this because not not to say that all cars are going to be driving themselves within a few generations. Yeah, we're a little bit off from that. But even if even if that technology is capable, none of these car manufacturers were suggesting

that that's going to become the norm. They were saying, this is the technology that will make us all safer drivers, and uh, if we go beyond that, if we start creating networks that these cars can communicate to UH in a way that protects our privacy because we don't want we don't want the world to know where we're going all the time, but in a way that allows the the infrastructure to adapt so that traffic becomes less of

a problem. So let's say that you are in a city that's outfitted with one of these networks, and the grant this is far into the future because it would cause it would require a huge infrastructure change. But you're in a city where this this is a reality, then your car could navigate through the city without the problem

of traffic. If you're going one way, UH, if a lot of cars are going one way, the traffic lights could adapt h dynamically to the flows of traffic, so that you know, you don't sit there and wonder like, why is this light red for so long? There's no one coming the other way? You know that would be less likely to happen. Or if there was an accident somewhere, your car could automatically root you through a different way right, or you could get to a point where there's no

more accidents. That would be nice. Hey, that would be That would be lovely. Let's take a quick break to think our sponsor and now back to the show. So, Lauren, I know you're really eager to talk about the next category of stuff, which is gaming technology. I am. I'm excited about it. You. Um, I think I think he said in your I I listened to your podcast with Chris about two thousand twelves ces um and you said that you had seen Project Fiona there. Yes, has since

become the Razor Edge. Yes, and that's not a finishing move in the w w E in this case, I that that that reference. Just wooh, don't I just what? Okay? I know I need to educate Lauren, but we can do that after the show. Uh So, Yeah, the the Razor Edge is a gaming tablet, and this is a heavy duty tablet. It's a Windows eight machine capable of running full video games on it. Uh you can run games and use the tablet like tilting the tablet to make it do stuff, or if you want to spring

for uh an optional case. The Razor Edge pro Version at least has a case that has controllers built into the size that buttons and thumbsticks that you would expect from any other controlling right, so you can play first person shooters or other types of games. Uh, directly from that, the resolution was amazing, the animation fantastic video gameplay. I mean it looked I mean we're talking like forty eight gigs of RAM depending on what model. Yeah, this is

this was a very impressive piece of technology. And uh, they had some where they were using I believe HDMI out to larger displays, so they were running games on this tablet showing it on the big display. So that was kind of fun too. And I wonder, I wonder if they could start integrating stuff like the we you does with you know, having a small screen big screen,

that would be interesting. I wonder, you know, I assume you could do that where you would have the h d m I feed out be different from what you're actually looking at on the screen. I don't know that there's any reason why you couldn't do that, But as far as I know, no one's no one's actually developed that. That could be wrong. That yeah, someone someone do that thing, she said, But yeah, that was that was pretty impressive

that one. As I recall, there the two basic two models, a basic model and a pro model, and the basic model I think is going to retail for around just under a thousand, just under thousand, then going up to like for the pro model. Yeah, so that's that's a healthy chunk of change for a tablet. But again, this is a fully functional computer tablet like, this is not this is not some uh stripped down mobile device. This

is a full computer in tablet form. Yeah. Yeah, which which just by itself I think is completely fascinating because the problem that I have with tablets anyways, the reason that I don't own one is that they're not powerful enough for me to do what I want to do with stuff. You know, I need something that's gonna run some kind of photo editing program. And you know, also Microsoft Word and I had I had the same issue

when I was I eventually did buy a tablet. I very rarely use my tablet, which, again, and I've said this before, it proves to me that the tablet form factor just isn't where I need it to be for to be a truly useful, indispensable part of my tech life. Now. I know other people who, you know, they never dropped their tablets constantly in their hands, and they have plenty of reasons why they use it, which is great, it's

just not the way I use stuff. Beyond that, in gaming technology, you also had the Invidios Shield Project Shield, which was that was a big secret. I mean that was when that was unveiled on the floor. You there was an audible gasp. Yeah. No, it was pretty neat. It was. So if you if you don't know what the Nvidios shield is, imagine, uh, an Xbox controller, because that's what it looks like. It's not an Xbox controller,

but it kind of looks like one. And uh, and you know it just think of it as having a blank face. So there's no buttons, there's no thumbsticks or anything. It's just a blank face. And then you open up a clamshell and it it opens to reveal the buttons and thumbsticks underneath the clamshell and on the underside of the clamshell is a screen. It's a five inch screen touchscreen. UM. So the the shield is a controller and screen all in one. And it does have this clamshell design, so

you open it and close it. Uh. It runs a version of Android, so you can play Android based games anytime you want. It can be stored locally on that device. But the the selling point is that it has software that allows you to stream content from a PC over WiFi to the project Shield controller, so you can play

full PC games on this little controller over the screen. Now, the big downside as far as I'm concerned, is that you have to be over WiFi to do this because the act the game is actually running on the PC, not on the shield like the Sheeld if you if you've heard of the on Live video game consoles, the same sort of thing where somewhere on the cloud there's a machine running the game and you are just running, and you know you're you're you're running a window that's

looking into it. Latency didn't seem to be a problem. It seemed very responsive. So it wasn't like there was a problem between when you pressed a button and when your character did something. That seemed pretty seamless. But it makes me wonder how practical is this. I mean, are there a lot of gamers who would love to play more computer games but they don't like having to sit

at their computer? Well, I mean, you know, maybe you know it's for for the adventurous types that they really want to play Call of Duty from the bathtub or yeah,

I guess. M Yeah, I'm not sure because yeah, the other problem I had was that, you know, you could argue, well, it also has an hd my out, so you could play it on your television, But you could build a video game gaming rig that you can play on the TV already, and there's some companies like Valve that make that really easy to Yeah, you know, and you know it's about to get easier. I heard the Valve was also there mostly to talk to hardware partners about steam Box. Yeah, yep.

Steam Box is one of those things that we still don't know a whole lot about other than the fact that it's on its way. But yeah, we understand that it will probably be a pretty lockdown experience, but it should be. Um, it should be about as good an experience as you can expect to to get with a system that you cannot customize yourself. Right. It's it's meant for the consumer who wants something they can plug into their entertainment system without having to worry about installing drivers

or managing other kinds of connections. So serious gamers have been doing this stuff on their own already for ages, but now it's getting to the point where the average consumer who may not have that kind of technological savvy can do it easily. Yeah. Yeah, you know, for for the PC gamer who wants to who wants to also be a concert. It's blurring the line between PC and console. And I think it's fascinating and I'm not entirely sure

what space it has. I'm happy to see it happen simply because I think anytime you have more competition within a field, it benefits the consumer. Of course, absolutely, so it puts pressure, like all of these products put pressure on companies like Microsoft and Sony because these could potentially start to siphon away gamers from the established consoles. Nintendo should already be worried. That's why I didn't mention it. Todo. No,

they really should be. I mean, I love no Pindow, don't get me wrong, but I think I think that we You is not enough to answer the competition. We talked about this one in our two Predictions show. And yeah, and I do think that, you know, it's I like the WEU, I like the concept, but I'm just not sure if it's you. Um but but but some of

those smaller players, Um, there was the Oculus rift. Okay, This kind of transitions us into another discussion about how Kickstarter was an incredible presence at c e S. Not directly, but there were projects that had been had received Kickstarter backing that had a presence at c S and you gotta think, you know, without that crowdfunding, they never could have made it out to see Yes, and yet there they were showing stuff off and these are these are enterprising,

innovative individuals or groups that are coming up with technologies

that are surprising people. And I heard several people within the technology journalism fields say their opinion is that some of these big companies, they have so many different lines of products that they have to nurture and maintain that it's really hard to innovate and create new stuff because they're mostly looking at, Okay, well, what features can we add to this existing stuff so that we continue to sell them yeah, yeah, and so that we get this

big product name to continue, whereas well, these small groups they're saying what cool stuff can we make happen? And then the Oculus Rift is a virtual reality gaming headset that has stereoscopic screens, so there's a screen dedicated to each eye that gives you a three D effect when you put it on, and it's really amazing. There's there's the latency is not an issue, so you don't get the swimmy effect when you turn your head and look around. Um,

and you can control it using a video game controller. Uh. And they even showed off some unreal tournament using this thing,

so it's like you are actually there and uh. Instead of they talked about how it helped or so so one journalists talked about how it helped, uh even out the playing field between console based gamers who use controllers and PC based gamers to use the keyboard mouse set up, because that's one of those things people who use keyboard and mouse are like, well, I'm much more accurate and fast. You have a controller, you're slower. Well with this you

aimed by looking at stuff. You're all right, let's see how fast your mouse is now, buddy boy. So but that was a huge success story. It was a Kickstarter backed project that actually had space at CS and it's not not it's not out for consumer purchase yet. There in the development or developer kits stage. Yeah, they're there's they're offering up kits for developers and what they call

hardcore enthusiasts. So if you're an enthusiast who doesn't care that there's not really any content to play, you can get one of these. But that's the thing, that's why they call it developer kits because they don't want consumers. They oh, I can get this on it right now, Xbox. It doesn't work that way. Um, but but you you actually you actually pre ordered I think something. Yes, I did. I was while I was at c S. I put in my pre order for a Pebble smart watch, which

I'm kind of jealous about him. I really, you know, if I had had however many dollars it was when it was up on Kickstarter, did I really not have? So? But at ninety nine, if you had backed at the ninety nine level or higher you were you were given that that would earn you a smart watch, assuming that they made their goal. Now, the big story about Pebble is their goal was one dollars. They raised ten million

starter kids. It's wonderful. Wow, that's like, yeah, ten million dollars, and so they actually they were They had to deal with some controversy because controversy might be too strong a word, but some criticism because they had originally anticipated they would start shipping the watches in September of two thousand twelve. That date came and went and they didn't ship. But

the the explanation was actually quite logical. They said, well, originally we thought we were going to raise a hundred thousand dollars and that we would produce maybe two thousand watches, and we were going to do all of that in the United States in a California facility that was a small facility that could handle two thousand. Yeah. Yeah, they knew what they were dealing with and had some deadlines

based on it. But then ten million dollars happened, and then they realized, well, in order to do this, we need to actually shift to a much larger manufacturing process, and they went overseas from manufacturing. That complicated the whole supply chain and made things slower. So they said, yeah, it turns out it was way more complex than what we had originally anticipated, which is why we we missed it. But we will start shipping the smart watches to Kickstarter

backers starting anyway twenty three. It would take six to eight weeks to get all the Kickstarter orders out, and they were going to deliver them in the order that people backed the project. So if you were one of those first people who backed the project, you're going to get your watch first. Now. I pre ordered while I was there, so I'm going to have a few months before I get mine. Cherry red, by the way, that's the color I went with. They have five colors available.

I went with cherry red. Sounds very silent. If you guys start watching tech stuff videos and you see me wearing a cherry red watch, that means my my pebble watch finally arrived. But yeah, they were another Kickser project that had a presence at the floor, and that's amazing. You know, there was a time where unless you were a major player, you didn't have a presence at CS.

If you did have a presence and you weren't a major player, it was a tiny little booth that was shoved way off in one corner that most people would never see. So it was kind of cool. Um, and then we got the weird stuff. We we we do the weird stuff. We do not do the weird stuff. That's I can't even say that here. Now you can say that we do the weird stuff. That's a doctor horrible reference that all of our listeners will appreciate for sweater vests. Yeah, not all of this is weird, but

it's stuff that doesn't easily fit into other categories. There was the track dot luggage sensor and uh that has it was a battery operated or it is a battery operated sensor that will text you where your luggage is. So let's say you go traveling, you get to the airport, you check your bag. It happens to have one of these trackers inside it. Uh, it will text you where it is. So let's say you end up in San Francisco,

but your bag is in uh, Tierra del Fuego. It will send you a text message saying, what the heck I'm in Tier del Fuego. It also has a Bluetooth sensor in it, so that when it reaches your near you, assuming that you have your phone paired up to it and it's once it comes into range, your phone will alert you so you'll know, oh, I need to look at my attention to Yeah, let me look at all of the black bags there and figure which one is mine. Oh, well,

I got a message, so it's it's coming in. It's close. Uh. So that was kind of neat. Um. There was the Plastic Logic had some flexible displays. This was not on the show floor. That was a closed door meeting that you had to rs VP two, so I went to see it. These were really cool. There were these flexible displays that they were explaining in one in the future could be really really flexible in more ways than one. They showed off, uh an implementation that was pretty neat

where they had a flexible e paper display. So it's e ink okay, so it's a very low energy needed to to create the image. They lay it down, it's showing a map, okay, so it's it looks like a sheet of paper that's showing a map. They lay a second one, a blank one, next to the first one, so that the edges overlap and then the map extends

automatically across both pages. It was just neat, right, and they explained that this was just a basic application that could be used in this sort of stuff, And mainly they're talking about using it for flexible display so that you could create a display that conforms to a curved wall. But I could see so many more applications for this, and UH, that was really exciting, So shout out to plastic logic. Uh As for the weird, I've got a tie between the two weirdest things I saw. Keep in

mind there are some weird stuff. It's the e s and I never saw there was the happy fork, which is a thing. It's it's yes, that is stelled h A P I. Yeah, it's it's a haptic feedback fork. And the concept it's actually kind of interesting. The concept is that if you are eating and you're eating too fast, that can be unhealthy. You could eat more than you need to. It's it's something that can lead to overeating and think dust can lead to weight gain or obesity.

So what the haptic fork allows you to do is set an interval that you do not wish to exceed when it comes to putting your fork to your plate and bringing it to your mouth and going back to your plate again. And if you exceed the speed, then the haptic fork will vibrate in your hand to alert you to the fact that you are eating far too quickly and you need to slow down. I'm not I'm not entirely positive that I need a smart fork in my life. I think that that normal intelligence level forks

are fine for me. It will also tell you by tracking your data. You can plug it into a computer and find out how many times and how frequently your fork went from plate to mouth. So then you can say, wow, not only did I eat quickly, I eat a lot or at least I took a lot of bites. Hey, Yeah, because there's a difference between the number of bites you're taking and the size of the bites your take. That's true.

If you if you grab a steak in one big stab and just eat the whole thing in one go, then your fork went to plate to mouth once that fork cannot tell the difference. Yeah. No, there was no weight sense or anything. And it also would allow you to remove the electronics components so that you could put the shell into the dishwasher. Yeah. Um. And you would charge it via USB of course, so make sure your your silverware is charged before you serve dinner. The other weird thing was the Hi ME w H E M

E robot. It's a massage robots massage robot. Yeah, you want to know what it looked like. Oh, I know you do, Lauren. I'm sure you've got some things running through your head. More more than anything really boring. Actually, so it looks like uh, as far as the designs that are probably going through your head, imagine a remote control car, but it has kind of bumpy wheels and uh, and it has sensors that tell it when it's getting towards the edge of your body so that it can

reverse its motion. So essentially is rolling over your back and you lay down, face down with this massage robot on your back and it just rolls across your back and gives you a massage that way. I guess that's cool. Yeah, it's not some sort of humanoid robot with like well no, no, I mean, you know. Nonetheless, I still I don't know. I would feel I would personally, Then again, I might be. I might be a terror both candidate for tech Stuff co host Aora because at a certain point, I'm like,

I don't really want robots to touch me. See, I was thinking, I was so sad you were not with me, because I would totally shoot a video segment with you laying down with a robot rolling across your back because I interview you. Now we've agreed that you get to do the embarrassing things. No, no, no, no, no no, embarrassing things. We totally have to share crap. I will, I will get on the electronic saddle. If you get

the massage robot, that's the that's the rule. All right. Well, if that's if that's the something to look forward to and see us two thousand fourteen folks, all right, Well, that that's just an overview of what I saw. Of course, there was so much more at this show. I mean way more. It's impossible to to a talk about it and to be even see any all of it when you're at this kind of thing right now, the big themes I would walk away from were connectivity, smart applications,

and ultra high definition. Those were the big ones that came back over and over and over again. But there was a lot of other stuff there too, and and it's diversifying more and more each year, so you're seeing lots of breakout areas like technology specifically for senior citizens or green tech, although that wasn't as big a thing this year. I'm worried that green tech was sort of a buzz trend that has already some of its incorporated

technology mainstream already. Yeah, I feel like it's mostly been incorporated. I think that people don't need to talk about it quite as much because all of the you know, all of the efforts to conserve energy are useful for anyone who's putting any new kind of technology together, so they they you know, they want to use it, hopefully, I hope, So,

I hope. So the other side of that is saying that, well, you know, consumer electronic show ultimately is all about consumerism and consumption and therefore is kind of antithetical to the whole green movement in the first place. And there's something to that. I mean, you you walk around, you take a look at one of these show floors, and if you just sit there and think this is this is a lot of lights. We're running a lot of electronics

right now. Yeah, there's some conflict, but anyway, mostly it's kind of cool. So um, yeah, if you guys have any suggestions, like if there's anything we talked about that she said, you know, that's not interesting, but I really want to know more about that. How does ultra high definition work? Or uh, tell me more about this idea of being able to see two different screens on the

same set or anything along those lines. Let us know s this an email our addresses tech stuff at Discovery dot com or drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter are handled there as tech stuff. Hs W, Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com