At the World's Largest Consumer Electronics Show, These 19 Products Are Genuinely New | Dispatch From CES

Not all of them represent the future, but they're the most interesting things we've seen so far.

CES, the consumer electronics show that has just turned 50, ends a day from now.

The industry as a whole is short on breakthroughs, and for several years running CES has produced nothing shocking or new.

It is still the most important hardware show of the year. More than 3,800 exhibitors launch products here every January, and more than 6,500 news organizations turn up to cover it — more than cover the Olympics. Apple and Google haven't shipped any revolutionary hardware either, so just about every piece of hardware worth a look ends up here.

After walking a few hundred booths, we picked out 19 products with something new about them.

There is a motorcycle that follows you out the door on its own, and a robot that helps Edward Snowden "return" to the United States. They may not change an industry, but they are at least interesting and new, and given time some of them may reach your life as well. What you will not find here is a thinner screen or a faster processor.

A Sense of the Future

• Sony's interactive projector

Sony set up its Future Lab last March, and at this year's CES it showed a projector prototype it designed recently.

Built-in sensors and motion tracking let the projector read objects placed on a tabletop and follow hand gestures.

On the floor it was running a demo of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Instead of only reading the story as static text, you interact with it directly through the projected light:

Drag the projected Alice anywhere on the table, and as the story unfolds you can do more with the scenes it casts.

The whole thing feels like working on one enormous white screen.

This is the projector Sony's Future Lab brought to CES this year. Put simply, it is a motion-tracking machine, a device that turns any flat surface into a touchscreen.

A demo about architectural design was more striking still:

Staff placed some blocks on the table, and the projector read their three-dimensional details — height, width and so on — and cast different architectural drawings onto their surfaces: interior structures, a lawn. When a staff member swiped a finger left and right, it could even simulate how the light changes over the course of a day.

Sony had in fact shown this Alice demo once before, at SXSW (South by Southwest Interactive Festival) in the US last March.

The projector is still a prototype, but these two examples already point to uses in design and education. Sony is collecting user feedback.

• An e-paper watch as thin as a sheet of paper

Sony's booth also held a watch that looked as if it were made of paper, except that its color kept changing, as if by magic.

This is the FES Watch U, the second-generation e-ink watch Sony released last August. Face and strap alike are made of e-ink displays: the whole watch, band included, is a screen that can show content.

Sony has applied the technology to other concept products too — collars, handbags, more watches. All are as thin as paper and cut into different shapes; one e-ink piece was folded into the shape of a wallet. As the light changes, its color shifts like a chameleon's. Everything here needs charging, and on the floor we saw several pieces that weren't being demonstrated sitting on charging cables. None of it has become a finished product yet.

TVs, computers, phones — the things we can't do without — have long since accustomed us to glowing screens. These paper-folded watches and wallets of Sony's still felt new.

• A gaming laptop with three screens

The most eye-catching gaming product at CES was arguably the Razer Valerie, a three-screen gaming laptop from peripherals maker Razer.

Open the lid and two extra screens slide out from the sides on their own. Imagine playing across three 17.3-inch 4K screens at once.

The screens are big and sharp; there is an Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics card and a mechanical keyboard; and folded up, all three screens included, the body is only 1.5 inches thick.

But the three-screen machine is only a concept.

• A chess set that moves its own pieces

Remember the magical chess set in Harry Potter, the one whose pieces move by themselves? The exhibit from Indian startup Square Off is exactly that kind of board. It looks no different from an ordinary chessboard, but under every square sits a magnet. The result: the pieces move on their own.

There are two ways to play. If you and your opponent are in different places, connect Square Off to a phone and your opponent's moves are mapped onto the real board, so you can play remotely in real time. The other player doesn't even need a Square Off; their app will do. Think of this smart set as a physical version of an online chess game, with all the data in the cloud.

The second mode is training. Square Off has a set of AI algorithms that can play you, much as Google's AlphaGo does. But the company's AI runs on data it has gathered itself, so in theory it won't be as strong as AlphaGo.

Honestly, watching the pieces slide around on their own was eerie — as if an invisible ghost were sitting across the board.

Some Wizardry for the Home, Too

This is another trend of recent CES years: alongside the high-tech gear, it is now common to find everyday household devices with a bit of amusing intelligence added in.

• A smart hairbrush that can identify your hair type

We came across a smart hairbrush L'Oréal made with Kérastase.

It doesn't look much different from an ordinary brush, but there is a microphone right in the middle. As the brush runs through your hair, it judges how healthy the hair is from the sound.

The handle holds a pressure sensor and a gyroscope, which track how hard you brush and at what angle, then tell you how to brush more smoothly.

The brush comes with an app, UX, which uses humidity, temperature and UV readings to give hair-care advice. It also recommends L'Oréal products. The brush goes on sale this fall for US$200 (about 1,383 yuan).

• Turning kitchen waste into fertilizer

Whirlpool's stand held a "food waste processor" — the ZERA Food Recycler — that looks like an air purifier.

It gets through a household's week of kitchen scraps in 24 hours. The catch is that it only handles organic waste, so whatever you do, don't drop in plastic or glass.

After the machine grinds and bakes the scraps, what is left looks like soil. QDaily tried it on site: the texture is close to coffee grounds, there is almost no odd smell afterwards, and the result can even be used as fertilizer.

It is taking pre-orders on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo at US$899 to US$999.

ZERA matters more for the environment than for the technology. By one count, the average American household produces 3.5 kg of food scraps a week — roughly 400 pounds a year. Food waste accounts for 20% of landfill volume.

A home food waste processor saves that landfill space and keeps an outdoor garden or lawn supplied with fertilizer.

Still, the thing is very "American." For Chinese city households with no big lawn or garden, this "soil" fertilizer isn't much use.

• A 42-inch e-ink drawing board

If you had a screen the size of a television, what would you do with it?

The Canadian company Quirk Logic brought the world's largest e-ink display to CES: Quilla, a full 42 inches. A screen that big obviously isn't only for looking at — you can write and doodle straight onto the e-ink, which makes it a decent replacement for an office whiteboard.

Big as it is, it sips power like a Kindle, running 16 hours on a charge, at a resolution of 2880 x 2160. Being E-ink, it stays readable in bright light. It also inherits every one of the Kindle's faults: lag, and no color.

Quilla works wirelessly; anything you write can be saved to a database on a mobile device and restored whenever you like. To make writing easier, Quilla comes with a set of touch gestures — copy, paste and zoom all take a gesture or two.

The giant e-ink screen is said to go on sale this June. The price hasn't been disclosed.

• A smart mattress that spares you and your partner some hassle

The health and wearables hall was more elaborate this year; the organizers split exhibitors into narrower categories such as "baby," "sports" and "beauty." In the "sleep tech" area we found a mattress with a gap down the middle.

This is Sleep Number's third-generation smart mattress. The gap is there so each side can be set to a different height — raising the head, say — or a different temperature.

The smart part is collecting health data and acting on it. The mattress adjusts its internal structure to your sleeping position, hunting for the mode it considers healthiest and most comfortable. If your partner starts snoring, it raises that side of the bed automatically — enough, supposedly, to stop the snoring.

The app logs sleep data, which in theory should be more accurate than what a smartwatch or an ordinary app records. Besides picking up sounds in the night, the mattress senses where your body is and whether you are tossing and turning.

It might get people to stay up late a little less.

• Cat owners want their cats not just well-fed, but healthier too

Automatic pet feeders are nothing new, but you may still worry: once the cat or dog "works out" how the machine dispenses food, it may keep demanding more. At CES we found a slightly cleverer feeder, Catspad, whose point is monitoring rather than pure "automation."

Catspad has two bowls that together hold a month of food and water for one cat. Sensors release food when the cat comes near, but only in the amounts you have set in advance — more at noon and less in the evening, for instance. An app shows how much the cat has eaten in all, so you can decide whether it needs more.

If there is more than one cat in the house, their tastes and habits may differ. If His Feline Majesty permits, you can fit him with the NFC chip that comes in the box; Catspad then tells the cats apart, gives each one its own portions of food and water, and records how much each has eaten.

Whether the thing will actually please the cat who runs your house, we can't say.

• Caring about weight, but caring more about body shape

Weight alone no longer satisfies the quantified-self crowd. Shape Scale, an "augmented reality" scale, cares about more than weight: it tracks body shape and body-fat percentage too.

An "arm" rises from the base, tipped with an infrared sensor and a camera. You stand in the middle and the arm circles you three times, finishing the scan in 30 seconds. The app then shows a report with three-dimensional measurements and a 3D heat map of where you carry more fat and where you carry less.

Set a target shape and Shape Scale will compare your body against it — which can be a little brutal — and tell you what training it will take, and how many days, to get there.

The drawback is that the scanner is enormous. Your home may simply have nowhere to put it.

Printing Can Still Get Creative

• Print yourself out — how's that for an idea?

Step inside a sphere and, in a few seconds, Canon cameras shoot your whole body from every angle, all 360 degrees of it. You come away with a full-color 3D-printed figure, small enough to hold, that looks exactly like you.

Two years ago, 3D technology maker Artec had already launched the world's first full-body scanner, able to complete a scan in 12 seconds and print full-color 3D models of people. This year the company brought the giant scanner and printer back to CES.

The 3D printer and the spherical photo booth together sell for US$165,000. A single photo, printed, costs US$85. Two years ago Artec charged just US$99 for it. This technology really hasn't moved much in the past few years.

3D printing has another basic flaw: it is slow. Average build time runs 10 to 20 hours. So a Solidfy 3D model isn't something you collect right after the photo — you leave a mailing address and wait a while for it to arrive.

For now Solidfy mainly sells personalized consumer products: 3D photography, small printed accessories. Its printing is also used for models in architectural design.

• What's the use of printing a face?

A lifelike model of a human face sat on one stand at CES, and the slightly ghoulish sight drew plenty of people over to take photos.

It was printed from the scan data of a real person's face. The technology from startup Bellus 3D is an AR camera that captures that data. I sat in front of a rig with three cameras and a distance sensor, turned my face left and right as instructed, and a few minutes later had a 3D scan of my face. It was a little frightening, but it reproduced my actual appearance fairly faithfully.

As for what you do with the image, Bellus 3D says the technology is aimed mainly at business. Plastic surgeons could use 3D facial data to plan an operation better and preview the result; cosmetics companies could use it to show customers how makeup would look on them. Or, if security systems moved from 2D face photos to 3D face capture, face recognition could get more accurate down the line.

The principle resembles Google's Project Tango, which judges how far away the things in front of you are and then puts augmented reality (AR) content on the screen. The difference is that Bellus 3D's cameras are more precise, and are used only to read and rebuild faces. The drawback: the camera module is still too bulky to fit into a phone for now.

• 2.5D printing? A printer that can print books for the blind

Casio showed a printer at this year's CES that raises tiny bumps on the surface of a page.

It is designed mainly for people with impaired vision. The printer uses a specially made paper of three layers: a foaming layer of heat-expanding resin microcapsules, a backing sheet, and an inkjet layer for color printing.

During printing, infrared heat makes the foaming layer swell into bumps, producing a page with real relief; the raised areas can stand up to 2 millimeters high.

We looked on site: both to the eye and under the fingers, the texture is genuinely three-dimensional.

Casio showed this printer at last year's CES too; this year's is an update. Besides printing Braille book materials, it can be used on product packaging.

Enterprise Electronics Don't Have to Be Boring Either

• This robot helps Snowden "return" to the US

Edward Snowden has lived in Moscow for years now, but he has hardly stayed out of the United States. He even went to a film festival there.

His body in America is Beam, a dorky, endearing robot — a square screen that moves around on wheels. Beam came to CES this year as well, with staff in a California office driving the machines around the hall to chat with passersby.

Think of it as a video call that can walk. The walking makes the person on the screen far more alive. People it approaches usually freeze for a second, then start talking to whoever is inside.

We went backstage to look at the controls. Beam's operator sees three windows: what the robot sees (an ordinary video call), the floor beneath it (so it doesn't hit anything), and their own video. You move with the arrow keys, and it feels no different from playing a game. Press an arrow and the screen draws a predicted path to make sure you don't run into something.

Beam comes in two versions, aimed mainly at business customers, priced at US$14,000 (97,000 yuan) and US$17,000 (118,000 yuan). The more expensive one has a lidar unit on its base to keep it from bumping into things as it moves.

• One-click product shots for online sellers

Canon brought more than individual cameras to CES this year. It also brought a complete photo studio, well suited to online sellers shooting their goods.

A red women's coat already hung on a rail in front of the backdrop. A staff member tapped a single button on an iPad and the shoot was done — the whole thing was fast, with none of the fuss of adjusting lights and positions.

Canon developed the setup with StyleShoots, a Dutch maker of fashion photography equipment. It consists of five banks of lights and a Canon 5D Mark III. It focuses and shoots by itself, then removes the background automatically. A set currently costs US$70,000 (about 480,000 yuan).

StyleShoots had already built "StyleShoots Vertical," a rig for shooting product photos vertically, back in 2013. Fashion brands including Macy's in the US, Marks & Spencer in Britain and Zalando in Germany have all bought the system to shoot their product photos.

Beyond selling cameras, Canon has been planning since last year to sell the CMOS image sensors it once kept for its own use to outside companies, adding a new line of business.

• A guide robot as tall as a person

A batch of new employees that Incheon International Airport, outside Seoul, South Korea, will soon be hiring turned up early at CES.

They all look endearingly dim, stand about as tall as an adult, and speak fluent Japanese, English and Chinese. A large display sits on the belly; expressions appear on the top of the head.

This is the LG Airport Guide robot LG showed at CES this year. Scan your boarding pass and the screen on its belly shows your boarding time, gate, the weather forecast, how long the walk takes, and more. Get lost in the terminal and it will walk you to where you're going.

Similar robots are already at work at San Jose airport in California. This past October, the airport "hired" three airport guide robots from South Korea's Future Robot, with much the same functions: a display that points passengers to gates, restaurants and shops. None of that is remarkable, but the three robots' "wages" aren't cheap — US$120,000 in all.

LG hasn't announced a price. Its robots are all connected to a machine-learning platform and get smarter as they go.

And a Few Things for Going Outdoors

• An all-around outdoor smartwatch

Casio's Android Wear watch, the WSD-F20, may be the most outdoor smartwatch there is. It has a barometer, an altimeter and a compass built in, and logs data from most outdoor activities you can think of: rowing, hiking, cycling, skiing... and yes, fishing.

The watch keeps some features from the first-generation F10 shown at CES last year, such as the two-layer display and water resistance to 50 meters, and adds heart-rate monitoring.

Its lines are tougher than the last generation's, and the touchscreen has an anti-fingerprint coating to keep it clean. The case is said to meet military standards for impact, so it should survive rough handling outdoors.

The biggest addition is offline GPS and maps. With the watch's built-in Location Memory app, you can drop marks or write notes on the map, and check exactly where you are outdoors without a phone.

It isn't a cheap smartwatch either: US$499 (about 3,500 yuan), well above the Apple Watch's US price of US$369.

On the battery life that dogs every smartwatch, staff said they have no standard figure yet — that will have to wait until the watch goes on sale this April.

• UA has new shoes again, and they know whether you're tiring

Sportswear brand Under Armour launched smart shoes last year; this year's second generation adds some features.

They still look normal: in appearance, feel and weight, an ordinary pair of sneakers. Sensors in the sole track activity, speed and location; connect them to the app to manage the data. You never charge them — according to the demonstrator at the stand, the battery outlives the shoes.

What's new is a stress mode. Mid-workout you can run a body test: after six jumps, the app tells you how your body is doing and whether you should stop and rest.

• A motorcycle that rides itself

Honda showed something unusual at CES 2017: a motorcycle.

The exhaust on the side tells you this is an ordinary gasoline motorcycle. Apart from two slim frames on either side, nothing looks different. But look closely and you'll see it isn't resting on its kickstand and nobody is holding it up. It stands upright "by itself," in a rather odd posture.

The demonstrator walked off, and the motorcycle followed him automatically. With someone riding it, there is no need to plant a foot to keep it balanced, and it won't fall over. Honda says the technology comes from the self-balancing system it built for the Uni-Cub unicycle.

You can see from the video that the bike balances by swiveling the front wheel through small angles — much the way we balance a bicycle or motorcycle ourselves at low speed. Honda says the angle between the front fork and the body changes with speed, so the bike can balance itself at any speed.

The technology is still at the research stage and can't be mass-produced yet, but for motorcycles it is a revolutionary change. Bikes usually weigh well over 100 kilograms, and anyone who isn't strong struggles to lift one after a fall or in an emergency; this could solve that. And since it can balance and steer on its own, self-driving motorcycles may not be far behind.