After a couple of years of mostly not attending conferences due to the global pandemic, The View From The Road returns with some details of the 2022 CES show!

Greetings from Las Vegas! The start of any new year brings us the annual technology conference known as CES. (It used to stand for the Consumer Electronics Show but the group that puts it on does not want that limiting name used anymore.) The show was all virtual last year due to the pandemic, but took place in person this week. However, like everything else right now, it was nothing like normal. This View From The Road details my experiences attending the conference. As in all years, I don’t spend time covering the big vendor announcements – you can look at the general tech media firms for that – although we’ve now learned that these firms are much more like PR hacks then journalists.

Just as the event organizers were preparing the halls to host the attendees, the COVID Omicron variant exploded. What happened afterward was interesting…and sad. Many of the technology media firms in the US that cover the show broke one of the biggest rules of journalism and made themselves the story, announcing en-masse that they were not going to attend the show. I have nothing but respect for any individuals that chose not to go for fear of their safety, but when entire news media companies announce simultaneously that they are “not attending” and “going to cover it remotely” what they’re telling you is they are actually the furthest thing from what a journalist is supposed to be. They chose to take the private PR announcements from the big brands, combine that with whatever they could view remotely, and then claimed that was “coverage.” It wasn’t – it was unbalanced PR at best. Real journalists have covered battlefields in wartime, they covered the Olympics during COVID, and these firms easily could have found one or two reporters willing to wear a mask and cover this event. (N95 masks and discipline about not eating indoors kept me 100% safe and it could have done so for anyone else as well.) Their boycott – and their subsequent on-line trashing of the event they didn’t actually attend – tells you much more about them then the event. Around a dozen big name exhibitors also pulled out of the show at the last minute – generally firms that have substantial Risk Management departments that were fearful of any COVID ramifications when their teams could not be trusted to maintain the required safety disciplines in public either.

I made my decision to attend this event early-on and did not change my mind. This event was in Las Vegas, Nevada – a state with a strict mask mandate (as opposed to other big US conference location states like Florida and Texas – states with governors who have flaunted COVID mitigation.) As I mentioned, I chose to wear N95 masks all the time, and never ate indoors at events or in restaurants. (I had one nice outdoor meal with some industry colleagues, but the rest of my meals were in my hotel room.) Yes, that made it a less enjoyable week, but I don’t go to CES to enjoy myself, I go to cover the events and learn the trends. Any journalist could have safely made the same decision. Again, the fact that they didn’t says more about their organizations than the event.

As always, the event kicks-off with “Media Days” – explicitly for the working press – and these were very, very lightly attended. I would guess they were at about 25% of their typical attendees. Essentially, the US media were no-shows, but the international media were there in full force (along with a few US folks like me that are not part of the large tech media organizations.) When the expo officially opened for everyone however, I’d say it was about 65-70% of regular attendance – hardly the “Ghost Town” that some of the big tech media firms reported (even though they were not there to witness it, had no investigated basis for that claim, and instead just cherry-picked photos off of the internet to make a point they had already concluded with their inherent bias.) There were a few gaps on the expo floor where some exhibitors pulled out, but the number of exhibiting firms actually rose from 1,700 to about 2,200 in the weeks up to the event. It was clearly a ‘different’ kind of CES – one without the huge crowds – but it was well worth the time there for myself and thousands of others.

I would caution everyone to take every single article about CES from the big tech media groups with a grain of salt. They generally were not there, so we have no idea what press release (or even possibly graft) they used to prioritize or source their stories. Here is a link to a twitter list of people I know who actually attended the event if that is of interest to you. (Of course these people may be tweeting about other things too, but at least they were actually there.)

One such example of a questionable article topic is “Metaverse” – one of this year’s hottest buzzwords. From what I saw, none of the articles are honestly reporting that it’s clearly a meaningless, catch-all phrase that PR agencies and exhibitors are trying to use to promote whatever they already do. Honestly, there is no Metaverse – it will not be a ‘third-life’ (so you can safely keep your Second Life avatars fully retired.) It is an overhyped expression that for all its misuse does truthfully indicate how our lives, our technology and the internet will be merging in new and different ways over the next few years. For now IMHO, it’s perfectly OK for you to ignore or discount any mention of that phrase – you’ll miss nothing.

Back at the actual event however, understanding the trends and themes of CES is probably the most important reason to go, and this year certainly had plenty of them. As the CTA’s VP of research, Steve Koenig explained, the pandemic we’ve been living through acted as an accelerant to speed-up both enterprise and consumer use of technology and the development of new solutions. Here are just a few examples he pointed out to consider:

· Transportation – Including the expected huge growth of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles – both for personal use and for shipping goods.

· Space Technology – Not just the well-publicized space tourists flying in billionaire’s rockets, but an entirely new class of reusable space vehicles, including the new Sierra Space Dream Chaser shown at this year’s conference.

· Sustainable Technology – including ecologically friendly fuels, alternative meats, and a smarter world where cities and the offices in them are more productive.

· Digital Health – with the explosion of telehealth and personal monitoring solutions that grew out of pandemic needs.

And then, in a category unto itself, we have the up-leveling of the home experience – also accelerated by the pandemic. Any professional that is not upgrading their home office right now is likely missing the boat, however home offices are only a fraction of the upgrading that is taking place. People are willing to spend more for premium at-home experiences, across entertainment, information devices, and smart-home devices to make daily life easier and more automated.

These trends were evident all over the CES expo floor, with a large amount of them dedicated to helping improve health at home and the office – especially during a pandemic. Devices and technologies touted as “Virus-Busters” or “Virus-Detectors” were all around, with everything from a new Targus UV disinfection light for keyboards to a whole series of “Vira-Warn” products meant to instantly detect COVID (and it can core-a-apple oh chef of the future.)

Just like at all the CESs I’ve attended in the past, I chose some slightly more obscure systems and devices for my pick-hits list. Here they are in no particular order:

· Canon has developed a collaboration system called AMLOS (short for activate my line of sight.) They don’t actually have the collaboration platform or engine, instead relying on Microsoft Teams for now and potentially others in the future, but what they do is take multiple streams from a single camera, allow the people in the room to use hand gestures to identify what things in the room are important (demo object, whiteboard, etc.) and present a choice of those streams to anyone watching on the far end. They also process the video so that it always looks best – including such tricks as adjusting the keystone on a side-wall-mounted whiteboard, and making anyone standing in the way of that whiteboard disappear so the far end sees only the board. This is the first public display of their system which has a lot of potential to enhance remote collaboration. Here’s a short video I tweeted of them describing it at CES.

· One of the smartest technologies I saw at the show this year was from Holo Industries. They have a holographic touch interface that allows people to make selections in the air without having to actually touch anything. Here is the video I shot of them.

· Another new product I was impressed by was the Noveto Systems N1 personal smart speaker. This is kind of like the personal listening ‘sound-domes’ that we used to use in AV, but without the dome. It detects that the listener is there and focuses ultrasound at his or her ears. It is so directional that someone standing next to you can’t hear it. Here is the video I shot of their CEO explaining it. It’s not that much of a demo – as my microphone was not detected to be a human listener’s ear so it didn’t get the sound – but trust me, it worked amazingly well.

· A new company called Resonado Labs has developed a new type of speaker driver that doesn’t use a standard circular cone. Their technology uses “a linear motor structure that provides an even force distribution which improves performance while maintaining flexible packaging, regardless of the shape.”

It seems to be an interesting technology that could help with the development of many non-traditional speakers.

To wrap-up this return of my View From The Road, CES was definitely a smaller, weirder event than in years past, but it was more than worthwhile making the effort to be there. I have nothing against streaming video and virtual conferences to be sure, but that’s not what CES is all about. CES is the opportunity for small firms to show breakthroughs, for large firms to expand people’s imagination, and for technologists like me to get a sense of what’s going on in the industry. One can only do that in person. Business conferences within one’s industry sector are generally best for socialization – something I do really enjoy and something that is just not safely possible today. CES 2022 was the same – it had almost no (safe) socialization, so that was never what it was all about – a point that many tech journalists who stayed-away apparently just didn’t understand. If all journalists do is cover news events that are “fun” then there wouldn’t be much actual news. Imagine a world where real reporters didn’t cover events that had risks and you’ll understand my utter disdain for the tech media and their stance this year.

If you’d like to get a sense of what it was like to be there, feel free to watch my AVNationTV Wrap-up show here.

For now, I’ll leave you with this interesting video log of what it’s like to ride in Teslas in the new Boring Company tunnels between the Las Vegas Convention Center Central Hall and the new West Hall. I’m not sure if this is what our future is meant to be, but it sure is different – a perfect metaphor for CES 2022.

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