Five Takeaways from CES 2020
Every year among the thousands upon thousands of unique and wonderful people and technology products that come and go through the aisles of the Las Vegas’ Consumer Electronics Show, there are a select handful of innovative products that emerge with real promise to develop and change the way people live.
We here at Imaginar love new technology and how it can affect the creative world, to quote John Lasseter “The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.”. With that in mind we decided to check out the busy show floor of CES 2020 to give you our five favourite things that we loved, but before that a quick honorable mention:
Honorable Mention: Targus Bags – Future Retail AR App & Eco Smart Backpack
Our friends at Targus Bags took to the show floor demonstrating the latest bag in their upcoming lineup and also showing off and impressing consumers with their augmented reality bag app that we helped develop. The Targus Cyprus Eco Smart backpack was designed to be fully environmentally friendly, it’s made of 26 recycled water bottles thus reducing the number of petroleum materials that are needed to make the bag. The bag has a side pocket for your mobile phone that functions as a charger so you can keep your phone charged on the go without the need for portable chargers. Like with IFA last year, Targus was demoing their augmented reality app that our sitster company “Immersive Studio” helped create, you can learn more about that project here.
1 – Sony Innovation Studios – Virtual Film Set
Like with their cameras Sony continues to innovate the world of filmmaking and production and this one is no exception. Coming straight out of their Innovation Studios is their virtual film set, but how does it work? Well imagine a studio space that is essentially a black box. However instead of a fully-built out physical set, though, projections of pre-filmed images create a space that looks realistic on camera, these images can be anything real or CGI, whatever the film needs. When filmed on camera it creates an image that’s seamless and realistic, this is thanks to Sony’s Atom technology which uses the camera and lighting reference to manipulate and change the perspective of the projections so that everything is seamless no matter where the camera is moved on set. Sony’s idea for this innovation is to help provide a solution for film productions with significantly lower budgets or those that require locations that are either impossible or provide difficulty to film.
2 – Star Labs – Neon Artificial Human
We now live in a digital age of AI, social media and instant connections, figuring out what’s real and what’s not can be tricky and it’s definitely getting harder. Enter Star Labs, a small little startup with investment from Samsung introduced Neon as it’s attempt at creating artificial humans. Whilst it’s still in it’s early stage Neon is a completely virtual being, giving AI a face and while they aren’t and can’t be a copy of an existing person they are modelled after real people. At some point in the future a Neon could be checking you into a hotel or be the face of a virtual chauffeur in you self driving car, whatever the case we are looking forward to seeing it’s future potential.
3 – Panasonic – 4k VR Glasses
With the anticipation of services like 5G providing the world with faster speeds to communicate and eliminating the days of buffering whilst streaming content to and from your device, Panasonic has announced it’s development of the world’s first 4k high dynamic range virtual reality glasses. Currently most VR headsets are large, clunky and can become uncomfortable after long periods of use and Panasonic intends to change that. Whilst it’s still in its prototyping phase and doesn’t have an official name yet this VR headset, well more like VR eye glasses are capable of displaying HDR, distortion-free images and have built in hi-fi earbuds for audio, with the ever changing landscape of Virtual Reality technologies this is going to be a game changer.
4 – Teslasuit – Haptic Gloves for VR
Keeping on the topic of virtual reality and the technological improvements to make experiences as immersive as possible, Teslasuit has unveiled their haptic gloves for VR looking like they are straight out of Ready Player One or Minority Report these gloves are marketed towards more professional applications in fields such as engineering, medicine and architecture. Using a combination of several technologies the gloves give the user the impression of touching and holding objects. Another thing is that they can also capture the motion of a user’s hands, record their pulse and other information. When paired with the Teslasuit it can achieve complete tracking of a person in VR space. Now we can definitely see and are excited to see this technology take off, we are very curious how it develops with apps such as Tilt Brush and games such as Dreams and the evolution of creating art and content within virtual reality.
5 – Nreal – AR Glasses
Now with our final selection on to something a bit different but also similar to the VR glasses mentioned earlier. AR or Augmented Reality is becoming the leading and evolving technology especially in the retail and advertisement spaces, however it’s only currently restricted to mobile devices which depending on the type of phone also has it’s own restrictions. Enter Nreal which has taken CES by storm by releasing their Dev kits for the glasses already, what’s great about their Ar device is that it’s not a phone and not a large bulky headset, it’s an actual pair of glasses. Running on an android snapdragon chipset this helps project AR content onto two 1080p micro displays that function as the lenses. With 6 DOF tracking and also speakers built into frame of the glasses this looks to revolutionise the way we experience and look at AR content, having developed a few AR apps for the retail markets we are aware of it’s potential and from that alone we are incredibly excited.
So that is our highlights of CES this year, from the looks of it the technology is evolving at a rapid rate and we cannot wait to see how these technologies are integrated into both our everyday life and the way we here at imaginar create the content that you view and experience.