CES 2018: Day 0 Recap
CES had a busy press day — and we’ve got the highlights
Although the show floors won’t officially open until Tuesday morning, the 2018 CES is already underway with a busy day of press conferences where several major consumer electronics brands plus Toyota and Hyundai unveiled their latest and hottest products and services. Starting at 8 a.m., each passing hour brought a new press conference as companies vie for media attention. Intel capped off the frantic press day with a flashy spectacle of a keynote session. Here’s a recap of all the highlights from the Monday of CES 2018:
Press Conference Highlights:
- LG unveiled its ThinQ smart home platform for its connected appliances with deep Google Assistant integration and basic Alexa support. The platform boasts interplays between LG’s lineup of smart home appliances, allowing, for example, the smart fridge to send a recipe to preprogram the connected oven, It also showcased new OLED and LED TVs, including a rollable 65-inch OLED TV, as well as the three commercial service robots that we mentioned in our CES preview post last week
- Toyota unveiled its “e-Pallette” concept vehicles, which will form an ambitious mobility system where autonomous vehicles go beyond as ride-sharing vehicles and also flexibly serve as mobile retail space and delivery trucks. Given that the Japanese company is working with Amazon and Pizza Hut to bring this retail vision to life, perhaps we are not that far from having self-driving Amazon lockers or that autonomous pizza delivery car from the latest season of Black Mirror.
- Hyundai launched its new hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. Despite some impressive stats on speed and drive time the Korean carmaker touted out, the reality remains that hydrogen-powered cars have lost the fight for infrastructure development to the electric vehicles, and are therefore doomed to become a niche at best.
- Panasonic showcased its increasingly diversified portfolio, from familiar products like smart speaker OLED TVs to more forward-looking initiatives, such as a 4K laser projector and developing smart highways to batteries for electric cars. The company will integrate Alexa and Google Assistant with its Skip Generation in-vehicle infotainment system for basic voice commands. Support for the two voice assistants that are having a real showdown at this CES, will be added to Panasonic’s new Ultra HD Blu-ray players as well.
- Hisense highlighted its new OLED TV sets with Alexa integration as well as something called “quantum dot” color technology. Hisense also touted out an exclusive TV app, created in partnership with Fox, that will offer viewers live streams of the upcoming World Cup 2018 games from different viewing angles.
- TCL unveiled its promising next-gen Roku TV as well as the first soundbar that integrates with Roku’s proprietary voice control system. Recent reports indicate that Roku plans to grow the voice component of its smart TV system to a full-blown voice assistant later this year, which would certainly benefit TCL products.
- Samsung took a high-level approach to its press conference this year, skewing specific product updates and releases to mainly talk about its plan to consolidate all its smart home products as well as its Gear smartwatches under the cloud-based SmartThings app across the board. This helps Samsung to create a HomeKit-like central hub for all its connected products, something that it should’ve done a few years ago. This also means that voice control via Bixby will be available for those connected products as well, making it a rare English-speaking smart home platform that uses neither Alexa nor Google Assistant.
- Sony capped off the press day with a few new releases. The company released a couple of new TVs and headphones, as well as two adorable robot pets that will soon be available in Japan. As usual, the new Sony TVs come with Google Assistant built-in, but they also work with other smart speakers such as Sony’s own LF-S50G, as well as the Amazon Echo speakers. On the premium side, the company one-upped itself by announcing an updated 4K projector that will ship this spring for $30,000, which marks a full $5,000 increase from the 4K projector it debuted at last year’s CES.
Intel’s Flashy Keynote on the Power of Data
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took the stage on Monday evening at the Monte Carlo Park Theater to deliver the first keynote of CES 2018. The press mostly expected the session to be focused on 5G technologies, but instead, what we got was an entertaining spectacle touting the transformative power of data harnessed and unleashed by Intel chips.
To warm up the crowd before the keynote, Intel brought on three set of futuristic performances that blends human performers with AI-powered drones and virtual AI musicians, offering a peek into the future of live theater production. Intel used 3D spatial mapping to map out the entire stage and coordinated the drones and lights via a central control system that syncs with the human performers’ movements.
Last week, Intel along with AMD revealed that their chips had a design flaw that made them vulnerable to Spectre and Meltdown, two major chip security vulnerabilities for data privacy breaches. Krzanich started the keynote by addressing the incident — light on apologies and heavy on how the tech community is coming together to fix the issue — before quickly moving on to the main theme of the night — how Intel’s powerful chips can help process the enormous amount of data needed to transform media and transportation with immersive content, autonomous vehicle, and of course, more drones.
On the Immersive media front, Intel has been pushing for VR and 360-degree video in sports broadcast for a couple of years now. This time, Intel introduced a new buzzword — “volumetric” videos — which is what Intel calls the new 360-video that captured with a dozen of HD 360 cameras that results in a clip where the editors and viewers can choose to switch between different point of views. Intel showcases some NFL footages captured with volumetric video before announcing that it will deliver 30 events from next month’s Winter Olympics game in South Korea in this immersive format. The company also announced a content partnership with Paramount studio to explore this POV-jumping video format in movies.
On the autonomous driving side, Intel announced autonomous driving partnerships with automakers including BMW, Nissan, Volkswagen, and Ferrari to push autonomous driving further. On stage, Krzanich cited studies that found autonomous vehicles can help save 157 hours off our commute time and 1.25 million lives from car accidents on average every year. Intel subsidiary Mobileye also demoed on stage their latest self-driving car, which is designed to look like a normal by tucking away all the cameras and sensors.
Beyond immersive content and autonomous vehicles, Intel also teased a new computing architecture called “neuromorphic computing” that could mean less data required for AI training and a major breakthrough in quantum computing.
To close out the show, Intel brought back the drones. First, it pulled back the curtains on Volocopter — an electric, one-person passenger drone created by a German company using Intel chips — for a very controlled on-stage test that offers attendees a peek at what Intel calls the future of urban vertical mobility. Then, CEO Brian Krzanich unleashed a fleet of its new shooting star mini-drones that lighted up the venue and danced gracefully mid-air to a pop tune.
As CES continues, the Lab team will discover more eye-opening innovations over the next few days as we lead client tours across the show floors. We will also continue to attend all the major keynote and select conference sessions to bring you the most noteworthy announcements. A deeper analysis of market trends will follow later this week. So stay tuned, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram (both @ipglab) for the latest updates.
