January 6, 2018
All aboard the (self-driving) bus – next stop, CES: Las Vegas’ annual gigantic tech fest.
About 4,000 companies – many of them start-ups – are arriving in town this weekend. Over the coming days, they will reveal new products, secure orders and hopefully provide a taste of the future at the trade fair.
The event has its roots in consumer gadgets, but now sprawls into fields including artificial intelligence, automobiles, medicine, marketing and even agriculture.
Most of the big technology brands in attendance will have something new to brag about. But increasingly, they hold flagship products back for stand-alone events.
In recent years much of the excitement has instead been delivered by smaller, lesser-known companies for whom CES presents a “break-out” opportunity.
Below is a sample of what to expect, including several exclusive hands-on videos with some of the new tech:
Artificial intelligence
If one firm could be said to have “won” last year’s expo, it was Amazon.
From fridges to cars, watches to robots, device-makers fell over themselves to support or build in its Alexa smart helper, leaving Google’s Assistant trailing in its wake.
New cooking controls have just been added to the AI’s capabilities, so watch out for a flurry of Alexa-connected microwaves this time round.
Google is, however, still in the fight.
Earlier this week, LG revealed its latest top-end TVs will feature the Assistant.
And this year, the search giant has booked a CES booth to show off its AI, as well as splurging on a new paint job for the Las Vegas monorail to promote it.
While the battle to secure the most tie-ups will likely be intense, one trend to look out for is products that provide the best of both worlds.
GE has pre-announced a ceiling light that supports both companies’ virtual assistants, and HTC already sells a smartphone that answers to both AIs’ wake words.
“We believe customer choice is important, and that multiple AIs can be complementary of each other,” an Amazon spokesman told the BBC.
Elsewhere, expect “AI-enhanced” to be the buzz phrase of the moment, even if it’s not always clear what that means.
“AI has become an overused term – often it just refers to there being a voice component or related cloud service,” commented Simon Bryant from the consultancy Futuresource.
He added that the key question to ask was whether the promise of artificial intelligence meant a device or service would become better over time.
So, to take one example, when HiRide Suspensions promises to show off a smart bicycle suspension system that uses AI, does it mean its electronics will learn to deliver a smoother ride over time, or merely that they have developed algorithms that would always deal with the same bump in the road in the same way?
The Italian start-up’s pre-CES materials are unclear on the matter.
Health
The so-called wellness market could prove to be CES’ most vibrant sector this year.
One recent forecast suggested the world’s annual healthcare spend will be nearly $9tn by the end of the decade. Both the big brands and start-ups believe there’s an opportunity to disrupt a sector currently dominated by specialists.
Doubtless, not all the claims being made at CES will stand up to scrutiny, but it’s heartening to see new tech trying to do something truly useful.
For example, Israel’s ICI Vision is in town to promote a pair of prototype glasses designed to tackle blind spots caused by retinal diseases.
It is trying to combine small cameras, eye-tracking software and projection tech to direct views onto the healthy parts of the back of a patient’s eye.
Samsung is taking a different approach to visual impairments with Relumino – glasses that use a smartphone to process the wearer’s view.
An app adds contrast, draws outlines and makes other colour changes to the view to make it clearer before floating the altered image into the eyewear’s display.
Several firms are seeking to treat undesired behaviour via vibration-based “haptic” feedback.
They include Keen – a smart bracelet that buzzes if it detects the wearer pulling their hair or picking their skin – and Snore Circle – an eye-mask that vibrates at different levels of intensity to nudge the owner into a different position if they make noises at night.
New parents also appear to be a favoured target for the latest health tech.
Stand-out launches include Me.Mum, a smartphone camera attachment whose maker claims it can detect mould-like particles in a woman’s saliva that signal when she is at her most fertile.
China’s Tuoxiao will be demoing a smart stethoscope designed for use with infants that sends heart and lung readings to the cloud for analysis to determine if pneumonia might be present.
Meanwhile, two European start-ups are seeking to help women strengthen their pelvic floor muscles to combat bladder leaks caused by childbirth.
Fizimed’s solution involves exercising with a force-sensing silicone device that provides feedback via an app.
Lifesense Group’s offering centres on smart underwear that tracks the reduction of urine loss over time in order to motivate its owner to keep exercising.
Smart home
The surprise success of smart speakers has meant that the smart home and wider “internet-of-things” category is finally taking off.
A flood of water use-tracking, temperature-adjusting, humidity-measuring, pollution-detecting gizmos will be on show, as well as dozens of smart locks – even though consumers remain suspicious about letting apps control access to their homes.
There are, however, some participants seeking to break out from the crowd by taking a different approach.
Crownstone is promoting a system in which a home’s lights and plug sockets automatically react to a resident’s presence based on them having a Bluetooth-broadcasting wearable or smartphone on them, rather than waiting to be given a command.
Miliboo will be showing off a smart sofa that not only wirelessly charges your handset or tablet but also keeps track of how long you’ve been sat in front of the TV while monitoring your posture.
Smarter homes will also be pitched as being safer homes.
Several companies will show off fall-detectors to warn if elderly residents have taken a tumble, and a safe that sends a smartphone alert if it detects it has been tampered with will also debut.
But perhaps most the extreme system we’ve spotted so far comes from Cherry Labs.
The Silicon Valley-based firm uses cameras and audio sensors to keep track of which family members and pets are in which room at what time.
It then collates a twice-daily log of their activities for the person in charge.
On the flip side, if the idea of being put under surveillance makes you feel queasy, Cone of Silence promises to prevent your smart speakers being able to eavesdrop on you – accidentally or otherwise.
It works by generating a white noise signal specifically designed to overload the speakers’ microphone arrays.
Televisions
LG has already shown off an outsized 8K TV – with 16 times as many pixels as a 1080p “full HD” screen – ahead of CES
But with a distinct lack of content for the super hi-vision format available, expect the focus to remain on 4K for the time being.
Manufacturers may instead try to convince enthusiasts to upgrade by boosting the maximum brightness levels of their screens, which has the benefit of delivering superior high dynamic range (HDR) images. As a result, glints of sunlight off water can be more startling, and shadows can reveal more detail.
Several brands will likely add support for Samsung’s HDR10+ standard, which is designed to prevent details in the brightest parts of the image being blown out on on some screens – a problem the rival Dolby Vision format already tackles.
And some of the higher-end sets may also introduce support for the new HDMI 2.1 specification, which can handle higher data rates and potentially allow screens to be sent 4K video at up to 120 frames per second.
But the big question is whether Samsung will unveil a “micro-LED” TV.
The technology uses tiny components that emit their own light rather than relying on a backlight.
This allows micro-LEDs to deliver the kind of deep blacks currently restricted to the OLED displays that LG specialises in.
But micro-LEDs should also be capable of brighter output than OLED, making it a superior choice for HDR content.
Those with a good memory may recall that Sony showed off a Crystal LED TV in 2012 based on the same technology.
That never went into mass production because it proved too expensive to make. We’ll soon find out whether Samsung has found a way to keep costs down.