CES 2013 gets weird
CES isn't just about phones, computers, and televisions — the largest consumer electronics show in the world is also home to a number of odd, strange, and downright confusing products. From "smart forks" to devices that sync with your phone to make sure your plants don't die, the products on the Las Vegas Convention Center show floor are just as unique as the people in this lovely city. If you've got a taste for the peculiar, make sure to keep checking back here.
Ke$ha and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad CES corporate afterparty
Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the latest in the series.
For two years in high school I was a cashier at Whole Foods. We were at a busy intersection right in the middle of three fancy prep schools, so we maintained a pretty steady flow of soccer moms doing wheatgrass shots or going really hard at the salad bar with each other all day long. My supervisor, the Front End Team Leader Eric, was one of those smart middle-aged Whole Foods dudes who seemed like...
Winbot 7 window cleaning robot uses a vacuum seal to stick to the glass
Robots are supposed to do our dirty work, so why not have them deal with the unenviable task of cleaning the outsides of our windows? It's certainly been done before, but here at CES 2013 we've just had the opportunity to try out a new model, the Winbot 7 from Ecovacs. Like a Roomba (as well as other window-cleaning robot competitors), the Winbot 7 automatically moves along your window surface while cleaning and squeegeeing the glass. What makes this robot better than the rest is that it uses...
The weird and wild interfaces of CES 2013
The public side of CES may all about showing off consumer gadgetry, but there's another, more lucrative CES going on behind the scenes. If you toured the private meeting rooms of the South Hall instead of the display booths, you'd find dozens of small manufacturers pitching themselves to the behemoths of the tech world, angling for an OEM deal or a partnership or even an acquisition. This year, the hottest commodity is a new take on UI. Depth cameras, gaze trackers, motion sensors: the...
We Found Fur In an iPhone Case: How a little bunny brightened a dark day at CES
Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the next in the series.
As LL Cool J took the stage at Sony’s massive exhibition space I was ready to pronounce this year’s CES dead on arrival. He was there to hype his regrettably-named music collaboration software Boomdizzle, throwing around generic technology terms with all the panache of a door-to-door vacuum salesman, the performance nowhere near as nuanced as his Special Agent Hanna in NCIS:LA’s. There was...
StickNFind Bluetooth stickers let you track any object with your phone
If you're the sort of person who's always losing their keys, Sticknfind may be your solution. The project, which has currently passed its Indiegogo funding goal by over 900 percent, pairs an iPhone or Android app with 4.1mm-thin "location stickers" that work with Bluetooth 4.0 and can attach to almost anything. The idea is that you'll be able to track any object within a range of 100 feet — battery life is said to be around a year.
Release your inner cross dresser with the future of advertising
Remember how ads in Minority Report were interactive? We've just played with a demo unit of such a system here at CES 2013; it's called Swivel digital signage, and it uses a Kinect sensor to place clothes and accessories onto passersby. The idea is that advertisers that use digital signage will not just show static images of models wearing clothes. Instead, as people walk up to the sign, they'll get to virtually "try on" the clothing. To do so, the company behind Swivel, FaceCake, scans and...
At CES, Thomas Edison materializes in the mist to help you win a free iPad
They say the ghosts of CES past sometimes roam the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Lonely souls, forever trapped in show floor purgatory, searching for someone — anyone — to free them from existential limbo. Sometimes that ghost is Thomas Edison, and this year, he wants to help you win a free iPad. But not before he shoots off another tweet from the aether.
What it's like to drive a 1600-pound mechanical spider
Today I was lucky enough to experience driving the Mondo Spider, a 1600 lb, five foot-tall and eight foot-long mechanical spider powered by hydraulics. The spider was built in 2006 by eatART, a non-profit in Vancouver, B.C, and can move at up to four feet per second. The spider used to run on gas, but was retrofitted in 2009 with a 5 kWh Lithium Ion battery, so like any Chevy Volt, you only need a wall outlet to charge it up. "It is the world's first zero-emission walking vehicle," eatART...
The future is now, the future is weird: an expedition into the dark heart of CES
Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the first in the series.
These days it seems like everyone is all about meeting up and nerding out. Music junkies lose their minds in the K-hole that Austin becomes every March, comic nerds let their freak flags fly in San Diego. Elite film appreciators flock to Robert Redford’s serene retreat in Park City, supreme art assholes learn about the future of being a supreme art asshole at Art Basel. The conference-festivals...
Ion Audio's Scratch 2 Go can turn you into a suction-cup DJ (hands-on)
Last year at CES Ion Audio showed off an iPad hardware peripheral to give aspiring DJs a better way to control music on their tablets, and this year the company is back with another approach — using suction cups. Scratch 2 Go is a set of controls that users physically stick onto the face of their iPad, giving them a tactile experience without taking their fingers off the screen. Five different controls are provided: a crossbar for switching between tracks, two scrubbers for scratching your...
Parrot's new Flower Power project wants to help keep your plants alive
Parrot, the company responsible for the well-known AR Drone, is working to make gardening easier with its brand new Flower Power project. Simply place the Flower Power device — which looks like a colorful leek — in the soil near any of your plants, pair the device with your iPhone or iPad, and you can track all of your plants' needs from anywhere. Once you've paired the device with your phone or tablet, you can choose your plant from a library of about 6000 plants, and if you're not...
HAPIfork measures every bite and tracks every meal on your iPhone
One of the wildest and most whimsical gadgets we've seen in quite a while is here on the show floor at CES: the HAPIfork. It's a "smart fork" that has a Bluetooth radio, a capacitive sensor, and a vibration motor built-in. The idea is that as you eat, every time the fork touches your mouth it triggers the sensor, measuring your bites on the app. If you eat too quickly, the fork vibrates to tell you to slow down.
French creator HAPIlabs' contention is that eating too fast is a cause of...
