CES 2016 Day 1: The biggest news from Vegas’ biggest tech show

Today on a special Vergecast, Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn are joined by Dan Seifert, Lauren Goode, and Sean O’Kane in Las Vegas at CES 2016. The panel discussed the numerous keynotes including Intel, LG, Samsung and Sony, being very tired and 3D printed souls.

We have a whole network of podcasts now! You can find them all in iTunes. They include the all new Ctrl Walt Delete podcast with Walt Mossberg and Nilay Patel, which dives deep into tech; Verge ESP with Emily Yoshida and Liz Lopatto, which blurs the lines between science and entertainment, and What's Tech? with Christopher Thomas Plante, which explains technology in layman's terms. You might also want to check out Re/code Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher.

As you're reading this, The Verge crew is preparing for the biggest day of CES, with dozens of major tech companies (think: Sony, Samsung, Intel, and more) taking to their respective stages to announce everything we'll be seeing on the show floor (and, indeed, more than a few concepts for the future).

Even if you can't be at CES — and statistically speaking, you're probably not here — you can still experience some of the biggest announcements in real time. Most of the major press conferences and keynotes will be streaming live, and you can find those streams below.

The CES show floor doesn't open until Wednesday, but the conference kicked off tonight with CES Unveiled, a more intimate (aka small, dense, and noisy) event where an eclectic mixture of companies come to preview their new products. This is where you see some of the show's wackier announcements, like a self-watering pot for houseplants, an eerie robot projector, and a device that makes your chair vibrate while playing games. But it's also where you start to get the sense for what matters at CES. Here are three of the big categories that showed up:

Cars are really complex these days. Even simple vehicle-related tasks can be can be difficult if you're not car-savvy and you need to follow the instructions in the ever-growing owner's manual.

To make life easier for its owners, Hyundai has built an augmented reality app called the Virtual Guide. It allows owners to use their phones to get more familiar with their cars and learn how to perform basic maintenance. I saw a demo of the app from Hyundai at CES and it works as advertised.

How do you get in?

It's a valid question. There is no obvious way in or out of the FFZERO1 — but then again, there is no obvious reality in this car.

Secretive car company Faraday Future had the buzziest keynote of CES 2016 so far — and while the company's actual announcements boiled down to announcing that it has 750 employees working on a new "Variable Platform Architecture" vehicle platform that will lead to various new cars, the hype level was off the charts. So far, in fact, that SVP Nick Sampson ended the presentation by explicitly saying that Faraday's goal is to revolutionize mobility the same way the iPhone revolutionized the phone industry.

"Apple didn't just redefine the phone, it transformed the way we communicate, organize, and enjoy our lives," he said. "That is what we at Faraday Future are hoping to do."

Faraday Future — the California-based electric car company that’s been operating in stealth mode for the past year and a half — made its first big splash on the eve of CES this week with the unveiling of the FFZERO1, a high-performance concept car. The sinewy machine looks more appropriate for a race track than a city street thanks to a claimed 1,000 horsepower, a 0-60 time under three seconds, and a top speed over 200 miles per hour. Of course, those are all purely theoretical numbers since this is just a concept, though the company teases that it could see “limited production.”

Wireless doesn't always mean wire free. Many smart home products still require plenty of wires, mostly for power. So a battery-powered, budget-friendly smart home camera that promises up to a year of battery life stands out a little bit, even at a noisy, gadget-filled CES.

That's the idea behind Blink, a home monitoring camera from a company called Immedia. Blink started as a Kickstarter campaign back in 2014 and is now starting to ship. We got a closer look at Blink at tonight's CES Unveiled preview event.

Motion controls often leave a lot to be desired. They can be unreliable, tiring, and not nearly as intuitive as they sound. But even at their most awkward, they confer a kind of regal power. There's something mystical about waving a palm or clenching a fist and making objects dance at your command. Spin! you gesture imperiously at a small four-wheeled robot waiting patiently on the floor. It obeys.

This is the Ziro (rhymes with "pyro"), an upcoming motion control system from ZeroUI. Ziro is one part kids' robotics kit and one part Power Glove. Its base components are a set of motors that can power any small modular robot design, plus a bright green glove lined with a motion sensor and flex strips along the thumb and first two fingers. A smartphone app links the two, letting users pair a specific motor action with a specific gesture.

D-Link made a splash at last year's Consumer Electronics Show with what can only be described as "the most insane wireless router in the history of mankind." The massive blood-red device, which resembled some type of mechanical arachnid flipped on its back, marked the apex of absurd networking technology design. D-Link's AC3200 Ultra Wi-Fi Router is back at this year's show, and it's brought its spider children along.

Picture it: an enormous queen spider station in the corner of your apartment that communicates wirelessly with its smaller and less powerful offspring. Every inch of your home is now blanketed with a pristine Wi-Fi connection, but at what risk to your personal safety?The spider children have names. The larger DIR-A91 router pairs with the smaller DAP-1655 Wi-Fi booster for a robust networking setup that will put you back $470 when they go on sale in the second quarter of 2016. D-Link plans on selling the Wi-Fi extender as a stand-alone unit, so you can fill your home with up to eight menacing red robo-spiders that may or may not collectively decide to murder you in your sleep and plot the takeover of the human race.

The Tipron, developed by Japanese smart device maker Cerevo, looks like a white eye on a sleek robotic stalk and wheeled base — a child's friendly sidekick droid in some '70s science fiction movie. It has one purpose: to move around your house and project things on walls. I assume there is a segment of the population that has always wanted a mobile robot projector; in fact, another one debuted two years ago. The rest of us can enjoy it for what it is: the prototypical weird CES gadget.

It's hard to say how well the Tipron fulfills its intended purpose on a crowded show floor, especially given the bright lights and lack of a screen to show off the projection quality. It's managed via a smartphone app that acts like a remote control for both the projector head and the robot itself. While moving, the Tipron folds up and slowly rolls wherever it's directed. With a button tap, it extends into projection mode, where users can change the angle and keystone of an image.

Nvidia is kicking off CES 2016 with its traditional first keynote. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wasted no time getting to the "punchline," a new computer for cars he's calling the Drive PX2, the follow-up to last year's Drive CX. Nvidia is famous for throwing out big numbers to tout the power of their processors, and many of them were mentioned here on stage. Its processing power is supposedly equivalent to 150 MacBook Pros, all sitting in a computer that's about the size of a lunchbox. It has 12 CPU cores that support a combined eight teraflops and 24 deep learning tera operations per second. It's also water-cooled, which makes sense given how hard these chips need to work.

Make sense? Probably not, but that's okay. The point is that Nvidia believes that a properly-designed self driving car needs to have a ton of processing power so that it can handle all the sensors, controls, and learning it needs to be fully autonomous (instead of, say, being dependent on connectivity to the cloud). Jen-Hsun Huang believes that "self-driving cars are hard" and Nvidia know how to do it. According to Nvidia, the PX2 can "process the inputs of 12 video cameras, plus lidar, radar and ultrasonic sensors."

Apple's HomeKit is slowly trying to bring the connected home into the mainstream, one smoke detector and Nest knock-off at a time. Of course, this is CES, so it's also time for things to get weird — and Hunter Fan Company is taking the opportunity to introduce what can only be described as two "smart fans" into the marketplace. The two models, named Symphony and Signal, feature built-in Wi-Fi so they can hook into HomeKit and be part of the system's automated auctions. If you want to have a fan that automatically turns on when you get home, Hunter has you covered.

"They're beautiful, affordable, high-quality pieces of decor that bring state-of-the-art Wi-Fi technology where it might not be expected: the ceiling fan," Hunter CEO John Alexander said in the kind of statement you often hear at CES. "As we celebrate 130 years, we have several exciting developments to share with our customers, and are proud to kick off 2016 at CES with Symphony and Signal."

Parrot's flashiest announcement of CES is without question its new drone, but it's shown up with one other neat — but much tamer — product, too: a self-watering pot for houseplants. The pot holds 2.2 liters of water and will automatically water your plant when it detects that the soil is too dry. It doesn't just guess at what your plant needs, either. There's a connected app that lets you choose between around 8,000 plants, letting the pot know exactly what it needs.

On top of watering your plant, the pot does its best to make sure that you don't kill your plant through other means. It also includes an acidity sensor, a temperature sensor, and a light sensor, and it'll use those three to tell you whether you need to give the plant different fertilizer, more or less sunlight, or a warmer or cooler environment. Obviously, you'll have to fix those issues on your own, but the app should make it much easier to keep your houseplants alive.

Faraday Future has been one of the most closely watched companies in the auto industry in recent months — which is particularly interesting because it hasn't revealed a single product. It's in stealth mode, but has made big claims about where it wants to take the electric car industry in the coming years. Now, here at CES 2016, we get a first look at exactly what Faraday is up to. Tune in!

Starting time: San Francisco: 8:00PM / New York: 11:00PM / London: 4:00AM / Berlin 5:00AM / Moscow: 7:00AM / Beijing: 12:00AM / Tokyo: 1:00PM / Sydney 3:00PM

French start-up Immersit wants to give your home movie viewings and gaming sessions the same physical intensity that's typically reserved for pricey theater seats and amusement parks. The company's Immersit furniture add-on is designed to work with any standard couch or chair, and it vibrates and moves depending on the on-screen action. If you're watching a scene that features daring space combat or a medieval battle, the Immersit will shake and shift with every barrel roll or sword blow; if you're playing a racing video game, you'll feel the car's brakes and wheels on the ground with every change in speed and turn.

I tried out the Immersit this afternoon at CES Unveiled alongside a racing game VR demo, and it gave a rather pedestrian run on the track a new physicality and energy. My car took hard turns and hurtled up and down ramps, and the Immersit-equipped chair shuddered appropriately; by the time I hopped out of the VR set, my palms were surprisingly sweaty. According to the company, the add-on performs just as well with popular gaming consoles and movies; VR's extra bit of immersion helps anchor the experience, but it's not a necessity. Immersit isn't ready to specify a price point for its product yet, but it's aiming for availability by the end of 2016.

I could tell you that the Lenovo IdeaCentre 610S home entertainment PC can be equipped with an Intel Skylake i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 750Ti GPU. I could tell you that it has an unusual prismatic design. I could even tell you that its top portion is a detachable projector that actually looked pretty good in the weirdly lit room in which I saw it.

But really, what I should tell you about the IdeaCentre 610S is that it’s the cutest goshdarn PC I’ve ever seen, it’s straight out of Doctor Who and Star Wars, and I want it to be at the heart of my apartment’s entertainment setup immediately. Lenovo says the projector can beam an image up to 110 inches across onto your wall, and the PC’s chassis has controls to adjust focus and positioning. There’s even a tripod hole on the bottom so you can place the projector where you like.

Lenovo has been refining its Yoga laptop formula ever since its introduction in 2012. The Yoga 3 Pro swapped to Intel’s Core M processor with some design tweaks, and last year’s Yoga 900 returned to the familiar Core i chip with some minor improvements. At CES today, Lenovo is unveiling its latest refinement of its twisting and flipping laptop: the Yoga 900S.

If none of the iPhones or Android devices take your fancy, your choice of smartphone becomes drastically limited. Limited choice is still some choice, though, and Microsoft's efforts at offering diversity have today been given a boost by Acer. The Taiwanese device maker is showing off its Liquid Jade Primo Windows 10 handset at CES, ahead of a February launch in Europe at a price of 569 euros.

The new MacBook is finally seeing more adapters and peripherals to make use of its versatile USB port, but longtime Mac notebook users will still feel like something's missing: MagSafe. Apple's magnetic charging connector has been a useful staple of the MacBook line for many years, saving your laptop from crashing to the floor when your cat runs into your cord. But Griffin has a solution: the accessory maker's BreakSafe USB-C cable restores magnetic charging to the MacBook.

The cable works as promised, plugging in firmly to the MacBook's USB-C port and detaching easily under pressure. You could definitely leave the adapter in your laptop most of the time, though of course you then wouldn't be able to plug anything else in. Unless you plugged the adapter into an adapter, of course. One other quirk of the BreakSafe connector is that, unlike regular USB-C, it's not actually reversible — you can blame magnets and polarity for that one. The BreakSafe cable will be out in April for $39.99.

Here's the problem with smart home security cameras: unless they can do significantly more than a simple motion detector, there isn't much of a point to them. In fact, they're kind of creepy!

Most cameras will alert you the second they see something move, but Netatmo has been doing things a little differently. Last year, it introduced an in-home camera that can identify individual faces and alert you — or not alert you — based on who it sees. And this year, Netatmo is introducing an outdoor camera that can tell the difference between people, animals, and vehicles.

Raumfeld is making its wireless speaker system a bit more attractive today: the company has announced that later this year, its system will support Google Cast and SoundCloud. These new services will join Tidal, TuneIn, Last.fm, and Spotify (via Spotify Connect). The new services will make Raumfeld's speakers more competitive with the likes of Sonos, which offers support for many more streaming services.

Google Cast support opens up Raumfeld's speaker system to wide range of apps and services, including Pandora, Google Play Music, and iHeartRadio. It also allows owners of the system to stream music from their desktop computers; prior to this, Raumfeld's speakers could only be used with a smartphone or tablet.

Sphero's BB-8 has been one of the most interesting tie-ins to Star Wars: The Force Awakens (which, given the sheer quantity of Star Wars merchandise this past year, is no small feat). The company this week is showing off its next trick, a wearable wristband that will let you use gestures to control and puppeteer the droid. The Force Band won't come out until later this year, but we got to try out an early prototype earlier today at CES.

Here's how the Force Band works, at least in its current state. Resting your hand to your side enters driving mode. With your palm down, Sphero looks away from you; with your palm up it looks toward you. Spin in place, and BB-8 spins with you. The direction also dictates where it drives, and the rolling speed is at least somewhat affected by your hand's elevation. Waving your hand in place will enter a gesture mode — the only one that worked for me was a nod "yes" when we did a quick right jab — and then putting your hand back down re-engages driving mode.

Routers may not be the worst piece of consumer electronics — I'd still give the crown to printers — but they're never far from the top of the list of miserable tech to deal with. For a good decade, no one seemed care. But this year, Google started trying to make routers a lot easier to use with its OnHub series. And now, Linksys is starting to head in that direction too.

Linksys announced today that it's planning to overhaul the companion app that can be used to control its routers. That doesn't sound like much, but the overhaul is supposed to give the app something resembling a modern design, pare down its long list of options into a more digestible format, and start to make helping users a priority.