CES 2024 Wrap-up
I attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year in Las Vegas, for the first time and wanted to share my thoughts with you.
The show is gigantic covering three halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center, a hall at the Venetian convention center, an outdoor plaza and countless offsite locations. According to the CES website over 135,000 people attend, and there are over 4,300 exhibitors. I walked an average of 20,000 steps a day for three days. I was exhausted but feel like I saw everything there was to see. After three days in Vegas and hundreds of thousands of people, I was ready to go home.
Overall, I thought it was good to attend the show at least once. I thought there would be more products or a wider variety of products. What I saw were aisles of sameness and an inability of exhibitors to storyteller as to why any of this mattered. Great feats of invention but little of the “why”. But when I did come across good stories it gave me hope for humanity again.
I loved seeing helpful robots that leveraged modularity. Yarbo showed a multipurpose robot that you attach different front end units to and it can go from cutting your grass in the summer to plowing your driveway in the winter. This is brilliant! No one likes plowing snow, so having a robot do it is perfect!
Hyundai showed large earth moving robots that were both fascinating and scary. I could see these helping reduce workplace injuries and improving efficiency, but kind of sad that they might reduce jobs too. Maybe the operators can be in a safe place and put these robots in harm’s way.
The big brands had large pavilions that told great stories. The big brands like LG are getting into new categories like camping and home elder care. In the Panasonic pavilion I came across the ELS Studio 3D experience featuring the new Fisker Ocean. A very knowledgable designer ran a group of us three through the history of ELS Studio, and the relationship with Fisker. We learned about all of the hardware (only subwoofers in the doors so wind noise doesn’t disrupt the sound) and the software (studio mode makes you feel like you’re there, no matter what seat you’re sitting in). This is how you sell a car, not just a sound system!
The smartest thing I saw at CES2024 was Kia’s Platform Beyond Vehicle. This electric van is another great example of modularity in consumer products. The electric van system is scalable at the factory for any task or need you can think of. The Kia designers also designed the brilliant interior storage modules that maximize space and make organization easy and efficient. I love this kind of thinking in consumer products. This is a product that solves problems and empowers business owners, large and small.
Kudos to Samsung for their focus on technology for accessibility such as tactile stickers and live captioning for calls. Additionally they had vignettes for helping find your lost pet, remote pet doctor’s appointments, and safety care for older people at home.
Sony and Honda collaborated on a car that had a TV screen on it’s nose to compliment the TV screen that spanned it’s dashboard. I know it’s more of a video display but the usefulness of a screen on the front of a car was lost on me. Especially on a day where it is 16 degrees and snowing in Akron, Ohio where I live (and sit comfortably inside watching the Samsung tv on my entertainment center). I’m guessing this is what happened to Sony’s car that it was developing on its own a while back.
What was more interesting from Sony was how they are empowering content creators to more easily create virtual content, and create more immersive storytelling.
Here are a couple other boards I created to share with you.
In closing, I left the show feeling a bit let down and uninspired. It would be nice if the exhibitors were more curated as the show gets very repetitive. The sheer size of the show also left me feeling a bit queasy about our mass consumerism and the comoditization of technology, resources, creativity, innovation, on and on…I simply do not need a television screen on the front of my car, nor do I need a flying car, and neither do you.
But there were highlights and if you dug deeper you could find some really nice uses of technology to enrich our lives and help solve the problems we face on a daily basis.