CES 2014 in depth: The Verge reports

CES has long been the best place in the world to find a bunch of insane and impractical home appliances. Last year saw the category reach its drunk-on-tech nadir, best exemplified by Samsung's incongruous efforts to push Evernote onto fridge doors. But what we found in 2014 may surprise you — some are taking a step back from the bizarre feature creep of 2013, and one new device is a genuine breakthrough that could foreshadow a potential revolution in the kitchen.

John Legend took the stage on Tuesday to cap off the Yahoo keynote, and it was good. It was a delight in fact, a brief respite after the certifiably bizarre spectacle that was SNL meets Yahoo meets David Pogue. For me, it was actually something of a surprise. The restraint of it, the un-CES-ness. I caught myself wondering aloud, “Why are you here, John?”

And that was it. The keynote ended, and we were once again swept up in the news of the day. (C’est la guerre.) But the performance itself hit on something about CES that I missed at first.

It’s pretty common to see scantily clad women at trade shows for industries dominated by men, and CES, the electronics trade show that lures around 150,000 people every January, is typically no different.

But last year, for whatever reason — maybe it was the economy; perhaps it was the political climate — they didn’t show up. Despite the high-profile body-paint incident, I only saw one pair of booth babes during the whole week. Perhaps society had moved on.

Asteroids barreled towards Earth from every direction, and my only defense was my eyes. I looked at one asteroid. I looked at another. Boom. Boom. Lasers from Earth had blown them into smithereens. And I didn’t lift a finger.

At CES 2014, a dozen or more companies are vying to track your arms, legs, and even your eyeballs. This demo was from Tobii, an eye-tracking technology company from Stockholm that wants to change the way we read, drive, and game. The company makes Kinect-like sensors, which each have two or three cameras and sit below your laptop’s screen. After two minutes of calibration (which involved staring at several dots as they darted around), I could pinpoint any spot on the screen with my eyes.

TVs have never looked better than they do at CES 2014. Gorgeous displays are all over the show floor, showcasing awe-inspiring demo footage. This year, perhaps more than ever before, TV manufacturers have all committed to following a similar hardware path: they’re building big, beautiful, and nearly indistinguishable televisions. But there’s one disheartening trend that remains alive and well this year: terrible software.

Technology giants like Samsung are seasoned experts when it comes to building quality TVs, but they’ve gotten no better at designing the software that controls them. User interfaces remain overwrought with unnecessary bloat, sacrificing speed and intuitiveness for features that most humans will never use. In 2014, smart TVs remain caught in a struggle between brand differentiation and usability. And too many consumers are losing as a result.

"Each one represents a different take," explained Valve's Gabe Newell at the unveiling. They also make it even less clear just what a Steam Machine is, who it's for, and why it's preferable to a traditional gaming PC.

At present, the biggest issue is function: SteamOS simply can't do as much as Windows. There are around 3,000 games on Steam, but only about 250 of them work with Linux. When you're building a machine almost exclusively for gaming, that's a problem, and it's a situation that has turned off at least a few manufacturers from baking SteamOS into their hardware.

Over the past five years, 3D printers have gone from expensive industrial equipment to hobbyist tools that can be had for as little as a few hundred dollars. 3D printing has captured the attention of schools, designers, and companies like UPS, which began offering printing service in its stores last August. And between the Stratasys-owned MakerBot and enthusiasts with homemade RepRap printers, dozens of small teams — several of which were at CES 2014’s 3D Printer Tech Zone — are racing to be the ones who take the technology mainstream.These companies’ entry-level printers have different names, different designs, and different price points, but they all share an audience: interested consumers who have relatively little technical knowledge and don’t want to take the jump on a rig that costs several thousand dollars. "We really want to focus on the consumer segment, or maybe a professional who just wants one on their desk," said Solidoodle’s Yahea Abdullah — a description that was echoed up and down the aisles of the tech zone. Solidoodle has a strong claim on the territory: in 2011, it became one of the first companies to market a cheap (initially $699), fully-assembled printer. Abdullah estimates the company has sold between 8,000 and 10,000 machines since then — for comparison, MakerBot sold 22,000 units between 2009 and mid-2013.

Robotic exoskeletons are a staple of sci-fi, pointing to a future where technology can overcome serious injury and bestow superhuman powers on people. But that future is here today for Paul Thacker, who uses an exoskeleton about once a month to stand up and walk around — no small feat, considering he's paralyzed from the chest down.

The 39-year-old Alaska native and snowmobile enthusiast lost the use of his lower body in a training accident in 2010 and was told he’d be confined to a wheelchair, potentially for the rest of his life. But while in physical therapy at a Colorado hospital in 2011, he stumbled across the Esko, a full-body, powered exoskeleton that is the signature product of Ekso Bionics, a Bay Area-robotics company.

By now, anyone wandering through the robotics section of CES has seen it: a plastic and metal humanoid performing on a hastily assembled stage, immobilized from the waist down. The gears and muscle tubes are exposed, leaving an impression somewhere between a Björk video and the Terminator. Most bystanders are startled at first before settling into a kind of baffled attention. They'll stand there for five minutes at a time, at a conference where most attendees are constantly in motion. "I don’t think it’s nice, you laughin'," the robot says in an exaggerated Clint Eastwood from A Fistful of Dollars. The overdriven speaker distorts his voice into a vaguely Dalek register, struggling to be heard over the noise of the conference hall. "You see, my mule don’t like people laughing."

The cars we found parked on a closed course across the street from the Las Vegas Convention Center this week can't actually see through walls, but they come pretty close: Ford is here at CES demonstrating Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication (V2V), a promising technology under development that could have a significant impact on road safety.

V2V has been in development for a number of years, using 802.11p — a simplified form of Wi-Fi geared specifically at the automotive industry — to beam bite-sized pieces of information between nearby cars. The specific mode that Ford is demonstrating is known as "Where I Am," which simply broadcasts your car's position, direction, speed, and other bits of situational information ten times per second to any other car close enough to listen.

This year, the Consumer Electronics Show has been dominated by things you can strap to your wrist. From electronic bangles to Bluetooth jewelry to a plethora of fitness trackers, it’s all here. The buzziest of these wearables are smartwatches, which aim to fulfill a long-held sci-fi dream of communication and accessing information on your wrist.

Pebble announced its all-new design, industry veteran MetaWatch launched a new brand and design ethos, and smaller companies filled countless booths showing off their own takes on the smartwatch. Even gaming-peripheral maker Razer is jumping into the fray with a device that’s markedly different from anything it’s ever produced before. With the market still ripe for the taking, everyone under the sun wants to try their hand at winning space on your wrist.

The Kolibree toothbrush knows more about your mouth than you ever wanted to know. It monitors how you brush your teeth and lets you know if you're doing it wrong (yes, you can fail at brushing your teeth). Even your dentist can’t monitor your oral hygiene on a daily basis, and that’s exactly why Kolibree exists.

CES 2014 saw plenty of devices that track everything about your life: the Netatmo June bracelet that monitors how much sun you're taking in, the AdhereTech smart pill bottle that reminds you to take your medication. But one of the most peculiar objects was Sen.se’s Mother and Motion Cookies set: it uses a number of customizable sensors disguised as small, colorful disks called "cookies" to track if someone left the refrigerator open, if you need to water your plants, and much more. You assign each sensor the appropriate activity to track, and it does so automatically.

Adam Cahan joined Yahoo in 2011 when his startup, the TV companion app IntoNow, was acquired. A year later, Marissa Mayer became CEO, and soon after she put him in charge of the company's lineup of mobile products. Over the next several months, Cahan oversaw an upgrade to nearly Yahoo's entire line of mobile products, starting with the critically acclaimed Yahoo Weather app.

Additional reporting by Nathan Ingraham

The television industry has been holding its breath. Just a few years after TV manufacturers banked on 3D to drive another round of TV purchases, they’ve found themselves having to change direction, using 4K as the latest carrot to entice consumers. But there hasn’t been anything to watch, and on the content side, viewing habits are in a state of wild flux as television viewers detach themselves from decades of convention thanks to DVRs, time shifting, and subscription service binge-watching.

During the 1990s, Sony was the world’s preeminent tech brand, dominating the field with its innovative designs and consistently superior products, but the past decade hasn't been so great.

The Japanese company lost its crown to Apple through a series of calamitous decisions and strategies that were more outlandish than forward thinking. So when Kazuo Hirai took over the mantle of CEO in 2012, his first task was merely to steady the ship. Two years on, however, Kaz is done patching up holes and making apologies, and Sony appears ready to lead from the front once more.

Dorothy is standing in the middle of a crowded hotel ballroom in Las Vegas. Toto is in her basket and her lipstick matches her red shoes. A group of middle-aged men come over, suits wrinkled and Coronas in hand. They sheepishly ask for a photo and she obliges with a smile.

There are actually three Dorothies in the room, but only Tala Marie can lay legitimate claim to the throne. The other two, she says with a laugh, are “business-corporate-slutty Dorothies, if that makes any sense.” I nod because it does.

"I'm going to punch you in the face," Paul Wight says. Better known as the Big Show, the 7-foot-tall former World Wrestling Entertainment champion looms over the crowd. He's greeting guests outside the Encore Theater in Las Vegas, where WWE is about to announce a 24/7 digital video network that could upend the cable industry. Fortunately for the man lined up to get his take a picture with him, the man formerly known as the Giant is only kidding. "I just got a memo," he says, before releasing a man who barely comes up to his waist from a hug. "I'm not allowed to simulate any chokeholds."

In an age when cable companies still have their customers in a chokehold that is all too real, the announcement of the WWE Network at CES last night stood out for its sheer customer-friendliness. Beginning Feb. 24th, wrestling fans will be able to access 12 monthly pay-per-view events, a lineup of original shows, and tons of historical programming from WWE's library — including every PPV in history. It will be available on Android, iOS, and Kindle Fire, as well as Roku, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 and 4 — and you can access it anywhere, for $9.99 a month with a six-month commitment.

The pool deck at the Marquee, a $1,500 bottle-service club at the Cosmopolitan hotel, is lined by cabanas heated by lamps and jacuzzis with walls made of plexiglass. On the first night of CES, the consumer electronics show that overtakes Las Vegas every January, a much more average-looking crowd than usual sat uncomfortably on the all-white furniture, dressed in business casual and puffing on e-cigs with glowing orange tips.

Kevin Frija, the CEO of Vapor Corp, which sponsored the decadent scene, pulled on an e-cigar at the back of the party and encouraged his employees to pass out chocolate- and coffee-flavored e-hookahs. “Vaping is one of those new disruptive technologies that could very well overtake the tobacco business and tobacco companies,” he tells The Verge.

For over a decade, Microsoft was the dominant presence at CES. But since pulling out of the show in 2013, the company has faded almost completely from view this year: the biggest Microsoft story at CES 2014 is that first-choice CEO candidate Alan Mulally has declined the job.

Since it’s not at the show, Microsoft has left it up to its hardware partners to push Windows 8. This year there’s an absence of new Windows PCs, especially exciting ones, and it’s noticeable. With a lack of new products and no presence on the floor, Microsoft and its platforms are almost nowhere to be seen.

"If you want to make something happen, it's gotta happen off the floor," the product rep tells me.

We're off the floor when he says it, on our way up two dozen stories to a private suite where his company has built a full booth — complete with floor-to-ceiling product racks — to entertain buyers and hopefully make a few sales. They'll spend the week here, wining and dining, trying to make deals, often late into the night. "I was with buyers until 5AM this morning," the rep says. He doesn't seem tired, or not in the usual way.

It used to be a strange idea to talk to an inanimate object, something companies like Google and Apple are making normal. Gone is the pain of pecking away at screens and digging through pages of menus, which has been replaced by simple voice commands.

But you can't mention those two tech giants without Nuance, the voice-services company. It specializes in turning what you say into text on your computer or mobile device, and sometimes it does that by sending your words to a server farm miles away. In return, it chews up what you say and spits out responses that devices can turn into actions.

For the fashion-conscious, wearable gadgets are currently not wearable. But at CES 2014, fashion moguls and global tech authorities are finally chatting about how to fix that problem. Design as a function isn't a new idea, but the fashion industry thinks about it differently — and the tech industry is starting to listen.

On Monday, Intel shared the stage with Barneys New York, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Opening Ceremony as they announced a collaboration between the fashion industry and the tech industry to make wearables more beautiful as they become more ubiquitous. That, Barneys New York COO Daniella Vitale says, is more opportunity than challenge. "One of the greatest opportunities for wearable technology as a concept to be successful is fairly simple," she said. "Design a beautiful accessory that our customers would desire."

The war on conflict minerals began heating up this week, following a controversial court case and an unexpected announcement at CES. On Monday, Intel announced that all of its microprocessors released in 2014 will be free of so-called conflict minerals: a class of four materials used to fund armed groups and militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and other central African countries.

Intel says it spent four years working to implement its supply chain program at the urging of human rights organizations and high-profile activists. The US government and other international groups say the trade of conflict minerals — including tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold — has helped finance violent groups and regimes in the DRC, where a relentless cycle of war has killed at least 5 million and displaced countless more since the 1990s.

Wrestling is about to become an app on your phone, tablet, and connected device, powered by the same technology that runs MLB At Bat. After years of delays, World Wrestling Entertainment said tonight it will proceed with the launch of the WWE Network, delivering all 12 monthly pay-per-view specials and a massive library of wrestling content for $9.99 a month. The network goes live Feb. 24.

In addition to new shows, the app will also grant you access to more than 100,000 hours of video-on-demand content, including every previous pay-per-view event from WWE, WCW, and ECW. It will become available on desktops and laptops and through the WWE app for iOS and Android, and the Kindle Fire. Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and 4, and Roku will also be able to access the network. The network will be available in the United States to start, with additional countries coming later this year and early next year.