CES 2020

In its 53rd year, the largest convention in the U.S. rang in the new decade in typical CES style: massive crowds of jet lagged attendees from all over the globe, thousands of new product introductions, hundreds of keynotes and panels, dealmaking in every corner, 250,000 tweets, sensory overload, and too much fast food and coffee to go. And that was just Day 1.

Once again, CES returned to one of the largest convention centers in the U.S., the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), plus multiple venues around the city. Attendees have been shuttling between venues for years. But big plans are afoot.

Three million square feet is not enough.

CES attendees saw LVCC’s western expansion towards the Las Vegas Strip. A new $2.1B 1.4M-square foot extension, to be finished in 2020, replaces the parking lot across the street from the North Hall. It will accommodate 600K more visitors a year.

More CES attendees, less parking? That shuttle bus ride is going to take days. I’ll sleep on the shuttle and save on hotel costs.

The city is planning a future convention complex that will crown Las Vegas as the premier meeting destination in the U.S. (surpassing Chicago) and elevate LVCC to #11 in the world. Why? The economic impact of visitors to Southern Nevada in 2018 was nearly $60B, with LVCC contributing $2B. Not bad for a city in the middle of a desert. But one local told me they resent visitors thinking that Las Vegas is only the Strip, and they definitely dislike the traffic congestion.

On Quora: I despise the Strip. I avoid it at all costs… There is nothing more boring to me than walking from casino to casino, and nothing more annoying to me than being on the Strip among a bunch of wide-eyed tourists.

This year continued CES’s practice of hosting concurrent mini summits focusing on the hot topics of the day: smart cities, smart homes, entertainment, sustainability, 5G, accessibility, digital health, fitness & wearables, self-driving cars, AI, drones, robotics, AR/VR, gaming, sports, family & kid tech, cryptocurrency, startups, research, and for the first time, resilience or disaster recovery.

The perennial question is: “What was the most interesting thing you saw at CES?” This year I thought hard but couldn’t come up with any new disruptive technology. Still, there were (and always are) lots of intriguing products, especially in Eureka Park, CES’s startup expo. Some items stop you in your tracks because they’re clever, weird, or silly, or hard to figure out, or marketing like there was no tomorrow.

Interesting Products

• 8K TVs were in abundance this year, just like 4K TVs in the last 2 years. In 2019, 4K TVs represented about 53% of global TV sales. 8K picture quality is undeniably gorgeous, but it’s expensive to keep upgrading your TV every 2 years - plus requiring faster internet and infrastructure - for shrinking marginal benefits and minimal content. 16K, anyone?
• Neon.life, a subsidiary of Samsung, showed their life-sized digital avatars. These were high-fidelity human simulators that can be programmed to speak and show emotions, as well as respond to a question (like a chatbot or Alexa). The technology is rudimentary and mostly hype today, but in the future each of us may have virtual AI-powered digital assistants that empower us to know more and do more. We already have intelligent bots in the automation world.
• Impossible Foods debuted their synthetic plant-based version of pork. It was apparently a hit with journalists. The real test will be making Moo Shu Pork.
• Watergen returned to CES with its efficient and relatively cost-effective technology to extract drinking water from the air around us.
• Motion Pillow, which won a CES Innovation Award, is a smart pillow that detects snoring, then physically shifts its shape, propping your head into another position to reduce snoring.
• Like other companies, Withings introduced their new multifunctional ScanWatch that provides readings for ECG, BP (based on PPG), SpO2, and sleep status (for sleep apnea).
• Unlike other companies, Valencell introduced a PPG-based BP-sensing capability in their smart sensor earbuds. I saw this years ago, but the company had opted to remove it from its earbuds, instead marketing the earbuds as fitness devices. Glad to see this made available, even if in a consumer device. Many people use earbuds, and some technologies are best when invisible.
• Two different commercial passenger drone prototypes the size of helicopters were shown by Bell Helicopter (2nd appearance at CES) and a Hyundai-Uber joint venture. These will be pilotless. A possible consequence is that while driverless cars improve ground traffic, if you look up, you’ll see taxi drones dotting the sky. Shades of cyber noir movie Blade Runner...
• Toyota offered a 360-degree projected animation of their future city concept, one they intend to start building at the base of Mt. Fuji, Japan, in 2021. In Toyota’s Woven City, driverless cars, robots, and humans function side by side under smart city management. Toyota will use hydrogen fuel cell cars, for which they are a major proponent.
• A parade of electric and/or autonomous vehicles was rolled out by automobile manufacturers eager to future-proof their product lines, from BMW and Ford (an electric Mustang) to Fisker, Byton, and Rivian, an Amazon startup. Perhaps the most buzzworthy was Sony’s surprising Vision-S, an e-car platform to showcase Sony’s connected technologies.
• John Deere brought in the AI-powered 8RX crop tractor with a super wide wingspan for efficient farming using GPS guidance accurate to 2-3 feet. Nice to see agritech at CES.
• Segway showed its S-Pod, essentially a personal transporter you sit in and drive with a joystick. The S-Pod balances on two wheels like the original Segway. Reporters had lots of fun, one even crashing it into a barrier. Segway swiftly promised modifications to make that less likely in the future. Shades of the transporter pods in the Disney-Pixar animated movie WALL-E...
• Ever lose a fly when chasing it with a fly swatter? A flying pest laser finder from Bzigo (Israel) tracks mosquitoes and other flying insects around a room, pointing them out with a laser. It’s still your job to swat them.

Trends

• Increasing convergence of smart connected technologies, whether around the city, in the car, at home, on a mobile device, or on one’s body. As the connected ecosystem matures, I’m seeing more companies tap multiple industries to combine unrelated technologies into solutions for consumers. User interface integrations continue to be developed, including Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
• Social mission came to the fore, as many companies presented green solutions, eco-friendly recyclable products, energy-saving devices, and even technologies that address climate change. For the first time, there was a section for resilience or disaster recovery products, including solar power generators for utility outages.
• More companies were focused on personal health and wellness. There was a whole section for sleep technologies, massage devices, escape/meditation pods, smart toilets, and so on. Interestingly, this was the first year CES allowed serious health-oriented sex tech companies to exhibit. Historically, CES’s expo used to be located adjacent to the adult film industry’s annual expo, which the adult industry probably timed for CES since most CES attendees were (and still are) male. Eventually CES took over the entire space and distanced itself from that industry.
• In terms of pure technology companies, Intel, which typically sponsors a huge pavilion in the same spot in Central Hall every year to showcase its engineering prototypes, was missing. (The Intel CEO did give a keynote.) On the other hand, IBM brought its simulated quantum computer for the second year in a row.
• CES security was evident but more subtle this year, probably due to attendee complaints. There were fewer security checkpoints and shorter lines, but more canine patrols.

Advice

Here’s some advice, for what it’s worth. CES can be mind-numbing, stressful, and exhausting if you try to cover the whole show. However, it is doable and useful if you know what you want to see and do some planning. A water bottle, good walking shoes, and setting a reasonable pace are essential. Eat a good breakfast, forget lunch, and practice sitting on the floor. Or, perhaps best, just read about it. :-D

Pardon me, but I have to go catch my Uber air taxi.

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