VanBerlo’s Design Engineer Martijn Baller and CTO Eric van Dorst are visiting the CES in Las Vegas this week. In a daily diary they share their vision on what they witness at the world’s biggest gathering place of innovative products with us. Today: part 2. (you can find the whole series here)
Everything is getting ‘smart’! From your toilet seat to your cutlery, from your toothbrush to your mirror, just about everything has turned ‘smart.’ Everything is connected with a useful app and sometimes to a comprehensive cloud. In most cases all action is kept into a small environment. Big data was not really big at CES. The biggest issue? The total lack of standardisation.
We found a new sensor for a smartphone, which was (unsurprisingly) connected by BLE. ZTE had a fishing sensor that was topped off with an interesting smart watch. Other nice achievements included the second screen and the third camera (wide angle) at LG. Our friends from Huawei were showing their newest NEXUS phone and their smart watch. Nice but in my opinion, a little too much in Las Vegas styling on display.
More and more on drones and 3D printers. It was difficult to not seeing a flying drone in one of the areas of the convention centre. The technology demos of Intel on RealSense on following a target and on Qualcomm on avoiding hitting a target were amongst the most impressive. DJI, Parrot, AEE are some of the major drone brands. It would be fantastic to see those technology giants working together.
3D printers are getting closer to the main market. The dual extruders are getting more common. The reliability is not perfect but the error feedback is fast improving. MarkForged showed carbon fibre filled materials on their printer with impressive strength.
If you are somebody in the camera business you have to do a 360. Last year you had already the Ricoh Theta, however Canon forgot to put one on the market. Although using a GoPro, you still need a third party add on.
VR is so cool at Oculus Rift, unfortunately for us the queue was far too long. Other vendors were more accessible but did not live up to the expectations. We did not find Microsoft HoloLens… but we shall not give up! Perhaps we also have to dig into the robots that are available. We’re not completely sure if they could be more than a gimmick, but we saw them dancing, cleaning windows and grilling on the BBQ.
Highlight of the day? Looking at the Sands location, visiting a huge hall of booths from start-ups. Nearly all the Kickstarter and Indiegogo projects were there on display. An enormous amount of creativity. Often well executed and very strange products. And of course Lego was there with the new WeDo 2.0 educational kit.
Last episode tomorrow!
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