Too much landfill, too little purpose: CES 2017 In the nearly 25 years since last walking the showfloor at the Consumer Electronics Show, the video game industry spun off its own show - E3 - while once-dominant television manufacturers now find themselves consigned to an ever-shrinking footprint with the Las Vegas Convention Centre. The world has changed substantially over …
Sounds like the problem is the distinct lack of flights of fancy. A VR session with a drone where the speaker pretty much says "hey, maybe this is interesting" seems pleasant enough but not the stuff of "TAKE MY MONEY!!!". And nobody, not even a marketeer ever dreamt of an internet-connected fridge with a camera inside - the point of CES used to be make you salivate at the future you could soon buy, not to present things that (at best) you tentatively say "yup, I guess I can think a use for that, might get one in a few years when my current one wears out..."
This is all cart before horse tech. How can they innocuously smuggle surveillance gear into your home, with the least amount of functionality necessary.
Big stuffy corps don't innovate. They try to cram wearbles, then drones, then VR, then chatbots that are dummer than a toddler, and try to pass it off as "AI".
Expect continued scraping the bottom of the barrel unless a truly revolutionary tech comes out of the left field and disrupts them all.
Do you mean "Who shat in your cereal?", or maybe "Who shits in your cereal?" or "Who is shitting in your cereal?"
... or ... could you mean "Who-shit in your cereal?" actual shit from Dr.Who himself? Real Time Lord faeces? Wow ... I have to get some of that ... I wonder what it's good for?
That's the real CES experience.
Maybe the next big business opportunity will be in tchotke recycling. All of those useless electronic gadgets should yield plenty of recyclable materials (similar to mobile phones) with the exception that no one will value the tchotke so they won't expect you to pay for the source product (like Mazuma)... If you pitch the business correctly you may even be eligible to get some "Green" grants.
All of those useless electronic gadgets should yield plenty of recyclable materials (similar to mobile phones)
I think phones and tablets are unusual in the density of (potentially) valuable and recyclable materials. For the generally bulkier but lower value tat that's not the case, and the recoverable value could well be very low indeed. Look at the Amazon Echo (Alexa). Over a kilogramme in weight, the vast bulk of which is the plastic case and the speaker. The recoverable electronics would be a couple of grammes of flimsy wires, a cheap mains adaptor, and basic audio codec and wifi chip/s.
Landfill the tat. That's the way forward.
In the 50s or 60s the case might have been metal - which is either recyclable or breaks down into the iron oxide it came from - or plywood (also returns to nature). eg Dansette record player. Though there was a lot of Bakelite as well.
Perhaps more gear could use aluminium and wood as casing - and a selling point. After all, the internals are all low power, low voltage, so hardly an electrocution or fire risk compared to HT driven valves and live chassis of post war radio sets.
Maybe the next big business opportunity will be in tchotke recycling.
I'm more edging towards mandatory Soylent Green recycling of the people who seem to think that yet-another-imitation-of-basically-the-same-idea represents anything even remotely touching innovation.
Yawn.
We're all still hoovering where bots can't reach, manually cleaning bathrooms, changing bed-sheets and home cooking, with no AI / Robots in sight. So why is big-media not scrutinizing the crap IoT products on offer?
The tech world bubble has a load of samey thinking execs that are totally overpaid and even more lost. I want the Jetson's leisure lifestyle, so where is it? Linking to a smartphone or having a fridge with a screen, isn't it. I want to be able to say to an IoT device:
* Did you cook the dinner?
* Did you do the washing up after?
* How about cleaning the bathrooms?
* Changed the bed sheets yet?
"Sure, it’s a prototype, a promise for the future, but if that’s the future you’re promising, perhaps you could rethink your life choices."
Really? VR is hot right now and it seems that a sure way to get some juicy VC dollars is to be in that industry. While we, as consumers and techies, might wish that the money was being pumped into projects that really were pushing the boundaries and making real progress with honest hopes of producing a representative, worthwhile finished product, I am not sure that's necessary to be a 'CEO' paying him/herself as huge VC-fuelled salary.
BUT, the hype around VR, while inevitably producing many duds and wastes of time and energy and money, also means that proper players with real products in development are willing to put the R&D money in.
Do I await my VR/augemented future? No, but I think there will be some really interesting products not so far away.
So far as the authors concern around 'surveillance capitalism', he is right on the, well, money. The part he left out of his example (of sensors tracking movement to control lights) was that controlling lights and air-conditioning and other such functions is something that has been available for yonk.
It's improving and becoming more commoditised, of course, but the problem is that that improvement is tied, inevitably, to a move to data-sucking cloud platforms. The sad reality is that the vast majority of smart home systems require Internet connectivity for most if not all of their functionality.
Quite apart from the privacy concerns, if I'm relying on lights to turn on and off while I'm on holidays (in the fanciful notion that this may deter burglars) then I want that to happen even if my Internet connection goes offline during that time. Likewise, if I'm relying on my smart sensors to ensure my house lights are all off 30 seconds after I leave a room, I don't want to come home from work and find them all still one because the Internet connection dropped out shortly before I left home in the morning.
So, while cloud-based control and storage can lead to cheaper and even, in some instances, 'smarter' and 'richer' devices, the reality is that 'cloud' is as much a crutch as and enabler in this market. Important, core functionality should always work with or without a connection and you should never be required to provide all your private tracking information just to use a product.
Trouble is the manufacturers KNOW they can't let that fish go or someone else will just hook it, so they make the cloud part and parcel and leave you a Hobson's Vhoice, figuring those that try not to will lose the critical repeat business and just vsnish later.
IOW, unless you can roll your own, you just can't have nice things; the long-term money isn't there.
I do not believe VR is going to last long. My S7 came with a free VR device and so I was eager to try it out. I even watched part of a basketball game in VR. It was very neat, but I quickly became bored with it. I haven't picked up the VR adapter for at least 6 months now. Everyone who played with it remarked how amazing it was, but they too were quickly bored with it. Ultimately I view VR much like 3D movies: a fad that will go away.
The Naughty America VR and BKK booths were both trying to get it in on that premise. The OhMiBod booth is opening up the SDK for their devices so the VR people can hitch a ride on their offerings. So you are probably right. This was the first CES that I have seen the adult industry leak over to CES since the AVN show split apart more than a decade ago.
@druck
Damned right I do. And I have that, in part - hacked together with some custom scripts and several pieces of open-source software and various disparate devices. My point is that there are very few system that are 'off-the-shelf' that don't rely heavily or entirely on 'cloud'.
That's the real issue. There's all this tech, but no-one has sufficient imagination to come up with a really good use for it, so they're just throwing ideas out there in the hope that one might just, possibly, if they are really, really lucky be the "Next Big Thing".
There has been very little true innovation for years (possibly decades), all that happens is that "things" get smaller/faster/cheaper allowing you to combine the functionality of several devices into one. That even CEOs can't come up with a good use for the kit they're flogging says it all.
Maybe it's not so much lack of imagination as it is the creative juices are running low. Everything we can imagine that can exist in reality already exists. The rest (like true VR and highly-accurate natural language processing out of the box) are still too far ahead of their time. There are only so many ways to build the proverbial better mousetrap before you run into previously-invented material, and since the best solutions tend to be the simplest, that limits your options, and it would take something truly revolutionary (like something that can disprove a fundamental tenet of physics) to really shake things up.
Think about it. Brainless bodies showing off pointless and often ugly designs that almost nobody in the Real World would consider buying. Fashion never addresses a need when designing, but goes for appearance over function. Fashion does all kinds of weird things just to be different from what's come before (Apple!).
CES seems to have the real-world relevance of fashion shows. Let's make it because it's all we can think of and hope someone wants it.
I have a found ONE good use for VR, taking 3D surrounds and stills of certain vacation, museum, and landscape sights. The depth makes a huge difference for such things. But all I need for that is a free app and an $8 folding plastic viewer for my phone.
I tried a Samsung VR at Best Buy recently. Within 5 minutes I felt motion sick and nauseous. I don't typically get these symptoms. I own a small fishing boat and spend plenty of time on the water in rough conditions and the only time I've ever gotten sea sick is when I drank too much the night before and was hung over. (I did catch a riotous Coho salmon that day though)
Imagine the average consumer who doesn't tolerate this sort of thing at all?
Yep, that slowness in tracking the landscape in the live VR view makes your equilibrium confused and then you get what astronauts call "stomach awareness." I got that while sitting too close to a large TV while playing Alien vs Predator on the Atari Jaguar a few years back. Am not looking forward to VR unless the tracking speed can fix this problem. Then, I have to ask, where is the "killer app?"
"The unbranded air sickness bag conveniently placed next to each Oculus CV1 headset" - I'd say that accessory will be necessary item in every autonomous vehicle (and hopefully it'll be empty when it's your time to use it;). I have no problems driving myself but my experience is less pleasant in passenger seat. Autonomy of these vehicles better extend to self cleaning as well.
I must be way out of step with people because I just don't get the attraction to a lot of this stuff.
First up are drones. I know a bunch of people that have spent thousands of dollars on these things. They play with them for a few days, maybe even a couple weeks then they become dust gatherers.
Next is VR. I don't really want to have something mounted on my head. The real world is actually a pretty good place....
Then there are wearables. Why do I need to constantly know my heart rate or how many steps I took today? That knowledge won't help me in any discernable way.
I tell you what. How about someone actually invent something useful. Like a robot that can cook dinner. Seems to me like we should be able to teach a machine where the fridge and stove are... Heck, how about one to do the laundry? Basically, I think they should focus on the mundane things we do in life that can essentially be scripted...
"I tell you what. How about someone actually invent something useful. Like a robot that can cook dinner." - Trust me, that robot would also be programmed to know your heart-rate, snoop outside the kitchen and provide relevant ads in addition to pot's content.
I think what is lacking is compelling *systems*.
Drones aren't an interesting thing. A set of drones which can find a lost child on a crowded Bondi Beach is interesting.
Similarly wearables aren't interesting. But a wearable which manages your diet and exercise is interesting. At the moment they only pump out raw numbers and if you want to track diet and exercise there's still a lot of "getting thongs to talk with things" to do the analysis. Let alone putting that analysis into immediately useful terms: can I have this bit of cake I just waved under the wristband's camera?
The basic problem is that whilst hardware is cheap, systems are expensive. The iPhone wasn't only a touch screen, battery, CPU and radio. It was the "app store" system which made that bit of glass interesting; just as iTunes Music Store made the iPod a better MP3 player than the better hardware from Creative.
CES simply threw a lot of hardware out there. Worse still, it will throw out different hardware next year. So if systems builders rely upon products released at CES will never get beyond the "make it run on the platform" stage before having to start over. At best CES is a demo of technical capability which allows systems builders to assess potential hardware partners.
It's not just that systems are expensive. It's also that systems people actually WANT are difficult because they (especially now) tend to involve things that are, for lack of a better word, "fuzzy". Take the examples above: cooking dinner and doing the laundry. How does a robot know if the milk in the fridge is still good, especially if the "best by" date is smudged? How does it know the sock on the floor is really a rag because it's lost its mate? How will your drone army recognize the lost child if the kidnappers immediately ties a wide-brim hat on the child, wraps a towel around her, and keeps her under an umbrella?
I'm not interested in gadgets and gimmicks but the promise of large, thin, light OLED screens opens the door to all sorts of possibilities once they cease to be high end toys for the early adopters. I'll agree that 4K resolution makes absolutely no sense for small screens -- the human eye's pixel density hasn't changed much since the days of standard definition TV (....which was designed with the properties of eyes in mind) but you really need that level of density once the display gets larger than 65" or so (say 2 meters).
I'll agree that most IoT is crapware, its yet another solution searching for problems driven by Marketing that still thinks in terms of Star Trek. But among the chaff there's a lot of interesting grains of wheat -- for example, I think devices like the Echo have promise but they're still very much at the 1.0 stage. I don't see a great future for complex electromechanical devices in the home; its bad enough getting a washing machine fixed so dealing with a baulky robot is going to be expensive. (Same with smart cars -- great idea. Until they go wrong.) The future will offer technologies that are useful because they solve problems without involving us (like answering the phone to telemarketers and telling them to get stuffed without bothering us.....a winner IMHO).
The problem with trying to get robots to turn away unwanted people for us is that the miscreants just start making smarter approaches to make sure they get the human, not the robot. Eventually, you get into Turing Test territory with potential knock-on effects (if you can make a robot that can fool any cold caller into thinking you're human, they can just turn around and use the same trick on you).
Frankly, without a way to verify the identity of ANY caller (and even then, what about pay phones?), there's no real way to effectively screen them out (because any loophole you're forced to leave will be abused).
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