CES 2016 Day 4: Highlights from the show floor

The Oculus Rift's $599 price has been a tough pill to swallow for many, but there's already a way in which you can slice it down to a more reasonable size: buy the Rift with a Dell or Alienware PC. Here at CES, Dell has just announced that it will take $200 off the price of purchasing a Rift VR headset with one of its certified Oculus Ready PCs.

So far, there are only three PC makers approved to carry the Oculus Ready branding — Dell, Alienware, and Asus — and two of them are technically the same company. Dell is capitalizing on that leading position now by opening orders for its Oculus Rift bundles, which are built around the Alienware X51 and Dell XPS 8900 desktops. The Oculus-certified variants of those PCs start at $1,199, which Dell will discount by $200 when you buy them along with a Rift headset. Deliveries of these bundles will be at the same time as those for direct preorders with Oculus, which are presently expected on March 28th.

It's day four of The Verge's time at CES 2016, and morale is not ideal. It's not that we don't love our jobs, and cool gadgets, and writing content for all of you, it's just that we fucking hate being awake for 20 hours a day. You can understand.

Also: after four days of refusing to eat the salad, our choices have come back to haunt us.

Project Tango is moving from experiment to a feature that Lenovo hopes will sell phones. Tonight at CES, Lenovo and Google have announced that the former will be the first manufacturer to release a consumer handset with Project Tango built in. And there's already a release date: it's coming this summer. The device will cost under $500 and will launch globally, according to both companies. Also interesting is that Lenovo and Google have said it'll be "less than 6.5 inches" in size. Tango, unveiled nearly two years ago, allows devices to map the 3D space around them in real time using a combination of cameras and sensors. If you need a refresher, here's what Google says its technology can make possible:

So that's what you can do with it, and here's what it's like to use it. Developers are invited to submit their best app ideas as part of the Project Tango App Incubator. The best will receive funding and be featured on Lenovo's phone out of the box. We're hoping to get some firsthand impressions of the first-ever consumer Project Tango smartphone before long.

Just a few days after Nikon announced a 360-degree camera here at CES, GoPro appears to be ready to do the same. During YouTube's keynote presentation at CES this evening, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said the company plans to release a "more casual" spherical camera sometime soon.

GoPro announced two spherical camera rigs capable of shooting 360-degree and 3D video for virtual reality last year at the Code Conference, but they are expensive products meant specifically for pro videographers. Since then, GoPro has made a steady stream of high-quality 360-degree videos using those rigs, and in fact Woodman was on stage with YouTube to announce that the two companies would be working together to make even more this year. (GoPro also publishes 360-degree videos to Facebook, one of the only other platforms that natively supports spherical video.) With that in mind, a consumer-grade 360-degree camera makes total sense.

US Marshals raided the CES booth of a Chinese electric skateboard company today on the grounds it was showing off a product patented by another company, according to a report in Bloomberg. The device, a one-wheeled self-balancing skateboard called the Trotter, is made by Changzhou First International Trade, and the marshals confiscated it and every piece of promotional material at the booth. Future Motion, a Silicon Valley startup that makes a similar one-wheeled electric skateboard, says it has a patent on the product and sent the marshals alongside its legal team to shut down the copycat.

Future Motion's device is called the OneWheel, and The Verge tried it last year and at CES 2014. Future Motion now sells the device through its website for $1,500. Founder Kyle Doerksen left his design job at Ideo to create the product two years ago, and he tells Bloomberg he acquired two patents over the course of the last six months to protect it — one for the device's technology and another for its design.

Of all the forecasts made here at CES, the smart home feels like one of the nearest to coming true. Nearly every big-name technology brand, from Google to Samsung to LG, is in the process of trying to own the way we interact with our appliances and our appliances interact with each other. But the most important name in the smart home is the one you’re least likely to find plastered inside the cavernous halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center: Alexa.

The name corresponds to Amazon’s cloud-based voice assistant, which began as the personal assistant inside the online shopping company’s Echo speaker that went on sale to the public in June. Over the course of a few months, however, Alexa has moved beyond Echo and into a host of third-party devices, in part thanks to Amazon’s $100 million Alexa Fund, which helps other companies incorporate the software into their products.

A year after pledging $300 million toward diversity initiatives, Intel is launching a new project that focuses on one element of the problem: online abuse.

The Hack Harassment initiative — launched in partnership with our sister site Recode, our parent company Vox Media, and Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation — is an attempt to find solutions to internet harassment, starting with a series of hackathons through the first half of 2016. Held both online and offline, the sessions will involve members of the tech industry, the media, the nonprofit world, and academia. They’re designed to raise awareness and find potential technological solutions to harassment, which will be presented at the Code Conference that starts May 31st. For a problem that’s inspired a lot of talk and few real solutions, it’s still just talk — but its organizers promise that more change is coming.

Transparent displays aren't really new in the technology industry, but this year at CES we're seeing some pretty amazing examples of them. There's LG's 18-inch display, which you can roll up like paper. And I just stopped by Panasonic's booth to check out the company's own transparent display. Unlike LG's, this one's not small enough to hold in your hand; it's meant for the living room. Panasonic's demo showcases the display attached to shelving with various home decor behind it. The wood you see beneath the glass is actually where all the technology is. Inside are micro LEDs that beam out the picture to the glass panel, which isn't completely transparent (Panasonic says engineers aim to get there), but still pretty amazing to see. It looks like any tinted glass you might normally see in someone's living room. And then? Then this happens.

Pretty cool, huh? There are some limitations with the current prototype that Panasonic's got. It maxes out at 1080p resolution, and as I said earlier, Panasonic isn't quite satisfied with the transparency level when the picture turns off. I don't really mind that part. I almost prefer the tint to clear glass. And just imagine the possibilities and what this sort of thing will enable in a few years. Need some notifications in the morning? Weather? News? You won't have to bother turning your cable box on.

Kodak dropped one of the most interesting announcements of CES this week when it unveiled a Super 8 camera — yes, one that uses real 8mm film. It's the first one Kodak's made since 1982, and it's an extremely welcome improvement over the awful, random products that have carried the Kodak brand in recent years.

I spent a few minutes speaking to Kodak's CEO Jeff Clarke yesterday about why the company made the camera (which you can watch below). Moments before he jumped on stage, both he and Kodak's global chief marketing officer handed me their business cards — which, yes, is still a thing that happens at CES — and I went weak in the knees. Neither of them were actual cards. Instead, they were the strips of 35mm film that you see above. [Ed. note: phone numbers and email addresses have been altered or removed]

The window for writing earnest "holy crap, VR is amazing" pieces largely closed years ago. We've written them ad nauseam, others have done the same (and for good reason, of course — VR is going to be one of the most transformative technologies of the next decade). Many of these pieces are great; some come about as close to conveying the experience of putting on modern, high-resolution, low-latency VR goggles as they possibly could without physically handing you a pair of your own to try on.

Now, as with drones, the conversation is shifting away from the whiz-bang of great VR hardware to applications. Cool, VR is usable now. What do we do with it?

The CES party circuit can help you understand the annual consumer technology extravaganza better than a full day spent prowling convention centers, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually fun. The Strip’s evening bashes are venues for hyper-focused expressions of brand identity, and they’re usually headlined by celebrities with little or no connection to the companies hosting the parties. Attend a few events away from the show floor, and you’ll find yourself drowning in lukewarm hors d’oeuvres and perfunctory, confused concerts. There are better ways to unwind after a day full of keynotes and product demos; one of them is sleeping.

I knew all of that going into yesterday, and CES still managed to surprise me. I watched one of 2015’s biggest hitmakers perform from a few feet away in a beautiful nightclub, but it’s not the Wednesday night performance I’m going to cherish. Instead, I’m going to remember the hour-plus I spent with Dan Halen, Jef Leppard, and the other middle-aged mercenaries that make up one of New England’s premier hair metal cover bands. I’m going to remember Mullett.

Like many tech companies, Haier of America is here at CES showing off its wares. But apart from TVs and home gadgets, they promised to have something extra special this year: an R2D2 rolling refrigerator with an internal projector. What human wouldn't want that? Not only would the fridge beep and boop just like R2, but it would helpfully keep your beers as cold as a spring day on Hoth.

We were excited to see it this week. We already knew how cool it looks, since it was unveiled last year by Haier Asia:

There's a section of the South Hall at CES 2016 that is filled with an insectoid buzzing and dozens of nets. It's the drone zone, and nearly every single one you see there has four or more rotors. But there's at least one that has, well, just one rotor: the Fleye. It's one of the many Kickstarter success stories here at CES, having surpassed its funding goal with time to spare. More importantly (especially when it comes to Kickstarters), it seems like production is well on its way toward hitting its September shipping goal.

The basic premise of the Fleye is simple: take all the spinny, choppy bits of a drone and encase them inside plastic grills and styrofoam, so that it's safer to fly indoors. In fact, it's primarily meant for indoor use: it doesn't go super fast, has a non-functioning GPS chip, and is controlled with an iPhone or Android phone. There are other drones with covered rotors, but seeing it as a cute little sphere somehow make it more approachable. The main body of the drone is made of the same material you'll find inside bike helmets, and inside that is a single rotor. The air it pushes down is directed by four sets of two fins, independently controlled so that the Fleye can hover and move about the room. It's only good for about 10 minutes of flying time, but it's flying time that is less likely to end in catastrophe because all the moving parts are encased inside.

Moto phones will soon no longer carry the Motorola branding. They will instead be known as Lenovo phones, while maintaining the "Moto" nickname and the winged "M" logos. Lenovo bought the Motorola mobile division from Google back in 2014. Rick Osterloh, Motorola's chief operating officer, told CNET about the change at CES today.

"We'll slowly phase out Motorola," he said. Lenovo will, however, keep using the Motorola name in organizational settings. Motorola's mobile division also includes products like the Moto 360, which might likely see a name change as well. (Think "Lenovo Moto G," or "Lenovo Moto 360.")

Nikon isn't the only company making 360-degree action cameras this year. Florida-based video company IC Real Tech unveiled a new 360x360 camera at CES this week with the Allie Go. It's a camera that's aiming right at the GoPro, which currently owns the action cam market — and I got to wear it.

The Allie Go is the portable version of IC Real Tech's line 360-degree home monitoring cameras. Roughly the size of a baseball (and therefore bulkier than something like a Hero Session 4), I was told it can still sit comfortably in a variety of helmet mounts for action enthusiasts. Using two 8MP sensors on the front and back, the device can capture hi-res video from all directions and stream them to mobile devices using its accompanying app. That video can also be saved to an internal microSD card, and IC Real Tech promises that users will soon be able to stream video directly to Facebook and YouTube later in the year, ready to be watched on mobile or even Google Cardboard. The video we saw on the floor wasn't the highest quality, thanks to pretty shoddy Wi-Fi, but in optimal settings streams should be similar to feeds from other action cams.

Ultra high-resolution video should make the viewer feel as if they were part of the action, or, in Canon’s words, "simulate a physical experience." It’s this philosophy that went into the interactive 8K Ride Experience in Canon’s booth at CES 2016. Held in a small makeshift screening room in front of three large projector screens, the two-minute experience left me wondering what I had missed that was supposed to make me feel things.

Four 4K projectors, each responsible for a quadrant of the projected screen, were stitched together to create the 8K video in front of me while two screens — one on each side of the main video screen — mirrored the main screen but were intentionally blurred to seemingly provide depth. From a user’s point of view, the video — shot in the Czech Republic with a Canon prototype 8K camera and lens — guided me through a forest and then through the streets of a major city, before finally looking down a track at an oncoming locomotive, a climax that was likely meant as homage to the 1895 silent French film The Arrival of the Mail Train. As urban legend has it, when the black-and-white film was shown for the first time, audience members screamed and ran to the back of the theater in terror. The impact in 8K, however, was lost on a savvy crowd already accustomed to 4K, 3D, and virtual reality headsets.

At a panel discussion at CES today, the US Department of Transportation announced that the winner of its Smart City Challenge — a contest to award $40 million to one medium-size American city for next-gen infrastructure — will also get collision avoidance technology for every bus in the city's transit system. The tech comes from Mobileye, the Israeli firm that supplies autonomous and semi-autonomous driving sensors and systems to a number of the world's biggest automakers. (Tesla, which recently deployed its Autopilot feature, also uses Mobileye's components.)

Under Armour announced a whole bunch of products earlier this week at CES, from its first pair of connected sneakers to a standard wrist-based activity tracker, but the most interesting announcement had to do with everyone's favorite supercomputer.

IBM and Under Armour are teaming up to show data from IBM Watson in Under Armour's core health and fitness app, UA Record. At first this might sound like your standard "partnership" or collaboration to beef up content within an app, but Watson's entrance into fitness — and its marriage of fitness data with other data — is significant.

For how excited everyone at CES is about the Internet of Things, most examples of it have tended to be pretty boring. They're dry suggestions of how you might start up music, play with your refrigerator, or hook up some weather sensor — all key parts of the smart home, but not something you'd necessarily get excited about. But Microsoft is doing things differently. In a bright spot in the middle of Samsung's Internet of Things keynote this morning, Microsoft's Bryan Roper came out to demo how Windows is integrating with smart home platforms to present data about your home.

Roper's enthusiasm is a huge part of what makes the demo interesting, but it also stands out because we get to see more than just a basic integration of two devices. Roper uses Cortana to generate a chart comparing people in the house and how much they use different appliances; based on what it displays, he's then able to drill down for more information. By the end of it, he sounds legitimately excited to have used data to bust Billy's bad habits. This sort of integration isn't brand new to Windows — Insteon, for instance, already connects with Cortana — but it's worth checking out if you're interested in what you could do with a home full of connected devices.

To look at the tech industry from afar, you'd think it's an unforgiving, bruising competition where only the consistently successful companies and products survive. That's broadly true, but there's one safety net, one little gift from the smirking tech gods, that keeps giving solace to failed software projects: the TV.

When a mobile operating system fails, it doesn't disappear, it's just converted into a TV operating system. Palm's webOS didn't make it in the mobile realm, but it lives on today through LG's flagship TV series. Samsung's current OS for televisions is Tizen, which is the culmination of a long line of mobile failures, starting with Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin, which merged into MeeGo, only to merge again with Samsung's unsuccessful Bada. And this week at CES, Panasonic announced a new range of Firefox OS-powered UHD TVs. This comes a month after Mozilla killed off the Firefox phone.

Apple has bought a San Diego startup working on artificial intelligence technology that analyzes facial expressions to detect emotions. Apple confirmed the news to The Wall Street Journal, giving the usual boilerplate statement that it "buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." Details of the deal weren't disclosed.

Facial recognition is an area in which several major tech companies have interest, though it's not without controversy. Facebook decided against releasing its Moments photo app in Europe because of fears over privacy regulations, and Google Photos only offers its facial recognition feature in the US.

Noted gaming peripheral maker Razer has a new watch. It's not a smartwatch, says the company, it's a digital watch with smart features. The way I'd describe the Razer Nabu Watch is as a Casio G-Shock with the ability to sync notifications and track fitness metrics. Which, sure, makes it more or less a smartwatch by our current lowly standards. Unlike the most common smartwatches, however, the Nabu Watch measures its battery life in months, not mere days. You'd still need to top its secondary screen up every seven days or so, but the watch part is unlikely to ever leave you stranded when away from a charger. And yet, this thing is still enormous and likely to appeal to only a limited group of people out there. Then again, Razer has never contended that it makes devices and gadgets for everyone. The company's tagline is "for gamers, by gamers," after all.

Watch our video interview above to learn more about the Nabu Watch as well as Razer's new Stargazer webcam, which is among the first to integrate Intel's RealSense depth-sensing technology. The Nabu Watch is going on sale this month for $149.99 (or $199.99 for the Forged edition, which swaps in stainless steel buttons), while the Stargazer will be available in the second quarter of 2016 for $199.99.

It took more than a year, but German company Bragi is finally shipping those buzzy wireless earbuds to its Kickstarter backers. Better yet, the company has a handful of those final production versions here at CES, and I finally got to try them.

During my elevator ride up to Bragi's suite on the 29th floor of the Venetian, the question in my mind was: can a hot product live up to a year's worth of expectation, especially considering the delays and mounting doubts? One hour later, on the ride back down, I was measuring just how much the Dash exceeded those expectations.

Smart fridges with touchscreens and Wi-Fi are a CES staple, but last year marked a disappointing lull in the connected madness; the usually reliable Samsung decided to concentrate on professional appliances, bringing actual chefs on stage to talk about how their products help them cook great food properly. It was pretty boring.

Thankfully, Samsung came back in style this year with the completely outrageous Family Hub Refrigerator, a Tizen-powered fridge with a gigantic 21.5-inch touchscreen. LG was a little more subdued but still had its share of kitchen futurism, with fridges that send notifications to your phone and let you see inside without opening the door.