Intel Gave a Dozen or So Answers About Your Life Over the Next Two Years. Will They Hold Up? | CES 2016

At this year's CES, Intel finally brought many of its once-conceptual products to market. This article is full of videos, so click with care!

Regular article

Smart hardware, big data, wearables, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence... Year after year, tech companies talk about these new technologies that are supposed to change your life. Yet what we can actually buy has been unremarkable for years. Fitness bands, phones and the like are all old news.

As James McQuivey, an analyst at the IT research firm Forrester, put it: "Tech companies can't just talk about technology concepts anymore. They have to turn the demo into a product that convinces consumers to buy one."

That is exactly what Intel did this year.

On stage, CEO Brian Krzanich held up a Curie processor so small that only a close-up camera shot could show it, and told the audience they were about to find out what it could do.

On the night before CES, the global consumer electronics show, opened, Intel gave a keynote of nearly 110 minutes without once saying "Internet of Things" or "wearables." The world's largest chip maker did not even mention phrases like "14nm process," the kind of term that signals Intel's technical lead.

Instead, the whole event was one concrete product demo after another. The presenters Krzanich invited were celebrities: triathlon champion Craig Alexander, parkour star Jason Paul, and A.R. Rahman, the composer of Slumdog Millionaire.

On the technology of the future, Intel offered a dozen or so answers of its own.

Drones and robots that follow you on their own

On a stage dotted with trees, a drone tracked a mountain cyclist. As the rider climbed and descended, the drone adjusted its own flight height and camera position to match his altitude and speed. It could also dodge a tree that suddenly stood in its path.

The Yuneec drone with RealSense technology

This works because of the two RealSense infrared cameras on the front of the drone, which can recognize obstacles. A built-in GPS module lets the drone find you and stay right behind you. A drone is no longer a toy you have to steer with a remote control in hand.

The drone, the Typhoon H from the Chinese company Yuneec, sells for US$1,799. You can already buy it. Last August, Intel invested US$60 million in the company.

The drone was not the only robot at the show.

Krzanich rode onto the stage on a Ninebot self-balancing scooter.

Halfway through the talk, an Intel staffer suddenly pulled up the scooter's "head," attached arms, and turned it into a robot that follows people around on its own. All you have to do is give it voice commands. This rideable robot is based on the Xiaomi Ninebot balance scooter made by the Chinese company Ninebot, in which Xiaomi and Intel had earlier invested together.

The robot will go on sale in the third quarter of 2016. At that point Intel will also open the same visual tracking technology to other partners.

A richer concert experience

Besides robots, Intel also staged the launch like a concert.

In the video above, a DJ shapes the music with hand gestures in the air, and the wristbands worn by the audience change color along with it. The impressive part is that every wave of the audience's wristbands shows up on the big screen. That beats waving a glow stick in the crowd to amuse yourself.

Making wristbands flash in time with the music is easy. Sending the movements of several thousand wristbands back to the screen and displaying them is not. It probably took a good number of signal receivers placed around the venue.

There was also a band made up of dozens of drones. Intel wants to use the event to apply for a Guinness World Record: the most drones controlled at once by a single person. The drone formation flying above the concert was controlled entirely by one computer.

The next guest was quite famous. The keyboardist was A.R. Rahman, who wrote the score for Slumdog Millionaire and has won Oscars for it. Last October he began performing with gestures, and this was his work.

The gesture performance behind him was done entirely with the white wristbands in the performers' hands. Their built-in Curie processors, working with several Intel RealSense SR300 cameras, recognize and track finger movements, and audio software turns the gestures into the matching sounds.

Live sports broadcasts with real-time data, and replays you can view from any angle

Intel supplies chips that can be built into equipment, along with technology for analyzing and processing data in real time. Together they open up new possibilities for sports. The technology will be used at ESPN's winter extreme sports competition this year and at an extreme sports event to be held in Toronto, Canada.

This month, Intel will be built into every part of the 2016 winter extreme sports competition. Working with the organizer, the sports network ESPN, it will fit Curie processors into the competitors' boards to track their speed and path in real time. The data will be used to present two events: men's skiing, which is all about top speed, and snowboard big air, which is full of flashy tricks.

To show off Curie, its newly released low-cost chip, Intel also brought in parkour star Jason Paul for a live demonstration.

The wearable he had on runs on a Curie chip and broadcasts his physical state live: heart rate, power, speed, tilt angle. The numbers show that these extreme athletes are not always as calm as they look.

The media company Red Bull Media House will use the technology to broadcast the sports events it runs.

When a rider flips in mid-air, a screen at the side shows the bike's acceleration, height and twist. The athlete's body data appears right next to it. For athletes and coaches, these real-time numbers may help improve technique, or even win competitions.

Viewers can also watch a rider's heart rate climb as he pulls off a difficult move. In a partnership with BMX events, each BMX bike will carry two Curie chips, one on the handlebars and one on the frame.

Even the NBA is using the Curie chip.

When you watch a replay of a real game, you can drag the view on a tablet to see the whole game from any angle, much as you would in an NBA mobile game. Better still, you can pause the replay and study the shooting position and the details of each move. For a die-hard basketball fan, copying your idol just got a little easier.

Data and flexible playback are what sports TV networks want. But for a league like Major League Baseball in the US, collecting data with radar that tracks the ball and arrays of high-speed cameras that track the players does not come cheap.

An augmented reality helmet that guides workers through on-site fault checks

For now, augmented reality is still used mainly in professional workplaces.

At the show, we also saw Intel demonstrate an augmented reality helmet. With it on, a worker can see the whole safety inspection procedure. The system gives a prompt at every step, like a game's tutorial mode. Workers can also see the temperature inside the pipes, so they don't touch the wrong one and get burned.

For hotels, office buildings and similar places, checking the exhaust valves in heat pump stations and boiler rooms is important safety maintenance. The helmet could save them a good deal in labor costs.

Of course, not every new-tech product looked that cool. Some sounded rather dubious: clothing that moves the wings on its back according to the wearer's mood, a studio that 3D-prints custom soles for your New Balance shoes, and a bra that breathes better when you work out hard...

But the products above were, until recently, ideas found only in concept designs, and now they are all about to go on sale. Perhaps after years of talking so much about technology, people have almost forgotten that Intel is behind marketing triumphs such as "Intel Inside" and its famous five-note chime.

Where does Intel's new technology come from?

All of the technology in these products comes from the New Technology Group, a division Intel created in a reorganization in April 2015. It is run by Mike Bell, who previously led product development at Palm and Apple, and it handles every new business outside traditional PCs and servers.

In May 2013, Brian Krzanich, Intel's COO, who came up through managing processor production lines, was promoted to CEO. By then Intel had already missed the smartphone market, and Krzanich set his sights on what he saw as the next computing revolution: wearables and the Internet of Things.

That same year, at the Maker Faire in Rome, Intel released its chip for the Internet of Things: Galileo, an Arduino-compatible board built on the x86 architecture. Intel wanted it to become the CPU of smart hardware, for devices where low power use matters more than performance.

A RealSense module taken apart: inside are infrared cameras, a laser rangefinder and a processor

In January 2014, Krzanich appeared at Intel's CES booth for the first time. Making their public debut alongside him were the Edison board, the size of an SD card, and Intel's 3D RealSense technology. Mooly Eden, general manager of the Perceptual Computing group, walked the audience through how the technology works, slide by slide. But the first-generation Galileo and Edison boards were expensive, both priced above US$50, and they never caught on widely in the Internet of Things industry.

Intel's processors for smart devices have now gone through three generations: Galileo, Edison and Curie. The latest, Curie, has dropped to US$10. And RealSense, in development since 2011, has matured enough to go into robots and drones sold to consumers.

RealSense will be a focus for Intel for a long time to come. Achin Bhowmik, general manager of Intel's Perceptual Computing group, who oversees it, told QDaily: "Every drone, every robot, every computer, every phone should have vision."

But smart hardware is a hard business

In smart hardware, Intel's rival is not any single chip company but the hundreds of chip makers that use the ARM architecture.

In the PC era, Intel followed Moore's Law: improving processor performance step by step was enough to keep a firm grip on the market.

Today, though, most smart hardware, whether phones, drones or wearables, runs on ARM-based chips. ARM itself does not make chips. Behind it stand hundreds of chip companies, most of which only design chips. The result is a smart hardware market with plenty of ARM-based chips, each tailored to a narrow niche. Technically, they can rarely match Intel's. But because they are so specialized, they fit developers' specific needs better.

A ski helmet shown by Intel

Phones and PCs differ little in function from one maker to the next. The future markets Intel is targeting will be far more fragmented.

"Every customer wants differentiation, but for us it's the same: give them a better imaging module, give them a better processor, and make them work better together. All of these are building blocks for us, and customers do different things on the same platform," Anil Nanduri, Intel's head of new markets and RealSense marketing, told QDaily in an interview.

Still, the PC and smart hardware markets remain very different.

In the PC era, you never heard of Intel tuning its products for a new piece of PC software. It only had to keep making faster processors and sell them by the ton to PC makers.

Now the markets for wearables, drones and robots are all immature. Intel has to work out not only how to adapt its technology to each product, but also how to find new uses for it.

So over the past year or two, Intel has bought a string of companies with related technology: Basis Science, a San Francisco wearables company, in May 2014; Recon, a Canadian smart-glasses company, in June 2015. To bring in more business, it spent US$16.7 billion in cash on Altera, a giant in programmable logic chips... Intel's job is far more complicated than it used to be: reaching out one by one to companies of every size, working with each of them to find uses for new technology, and even buying technology companies outright.

Intel is becoming a different company. It needs this transformation to fit the new era. It just won't be easy.