The World's Biggest Consumer Electronics Show Opens Next Week. What's Worth Watching? | CES 2018

Cars, VR, TVs, drones — every one of these industries has changed this year, some more than others.

CES, the world's largest consumer electronics show, is now in its 51st year. The first one was held in 1967.

A few inventions you already know — the VCR, the DVD, high-definition television — showed up here first, then made their way into homes everywhere.

Most of the new technologies displayed at CES over the past five years came and went without opening a new market: drones, wearables, 3D printing, VR/AR. Even so, CES is still treated as a bellwether for where the hardware industry will go over the next one to five years. In a few days, about 200,000 people will converge on the gambling capital of Las Vegas for the tech industry's most important event.

This year's show starts on January 9 local time and runs for three days. From tech companies like Samsung, Sony and Huawei, to carmakers like Ford, Toyota and Honda, to startups of every kind with a novel idea, more than 4,000 companies are expected to show their newest products and technologies there.

QDaily will be reporting from Las Vegas. Before the doors open, here is our rundown of what's worth watching.

Cars, cars, cars

CES has become an auto show that talks about technology. The North Hall of the main venue, the Las Vegas Convention Center, is occupied by carmakers and parts suppliers: Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Continental, ZF, Delphi.

Continental will show a system that uses deep-learning algorithms to analyze a user's habits and tune the navigation and infotainment system accordingly, along with Holistic Connectivity, a connected-car package built on Amazon's voice assistant Alexa. A wireless charging technology that charges a car as soon as it parks is also expected. The autonomous-driving package the company took to CES Asia 2017 will not be there.

On January 4 local time, the Toyota Research Institute unveiled its next-generation autonomous-driving platform, codenamed Platform 3.0. It is built on a Lexus LS 600hL fitted with four LiDAR units covering a full 360 degrees, which Toyota says can "accurately detect objects in the environment, including notoriously hard-to-see dark objects."

Most self-driving cars today bolt a large LiDAR unit to the outside of the body. Toyota has instead shaped the LiDAR into something that looks like a roof-mounted luggage box. It plans to show the new work at CES, where its booth will be the largest in the main venue's North Hall.

Delphi will show a system that makes internal combustion engines burn less fuel. It claims to use advanced computer algorithms to decide, moment by moment, when an engine's cylinders need to fire; combined with a 48-volt mild-hybrid system, the company says efficiency improves by more than 15%.

The Canadian parts maker Magna will use its E1 demonstrator — a modified Tesla — to show its etelligentDrive system, which pairs a highly integrated front-axle electric drive with a rear-axle electric drive that carries two motors.

ZF, the well-known transmission designer and manufacturer, will exhibit a concept steering wheel with a screen in it, built for Level 3 and higher autonomous driving. The LCD screen in the wheel responds to gestures, and a double-tap or a swipe at set points on the rim controls other functions.

Baidu will hold its own conference at CES. From the previews so far, it will present the Apollo project and offer rides in a self-driving car converted from a Lincoln.

Away from the booths, CES will host several discussions about safety and liability in self-driving cars. Ford CEO and President Jim Hackett is one of the event's keynote speakers — perhaps another sign of how much the auto industry now matters to CES.

Consumer electronics, closer to your daily life

Consumer electronics will not be missing from CES. Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus may all show two-in-one laptops built on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835. Razer's triple-screen laptop last year was striking enough that one unit was stolen at the show. Whether there will be a redesigned gaming laptop this year remains to be seen.

Huawei launched the Mate 9 Pro at last year's CES. This year it will hold a press event on the show's opening day, probably for a wearable or a new phone. Posters for the Huawei Mate 10 Pro are already up outside the main venue's Central Hall, and reports say Huawei will use this CES to announce the phone's formal entry into the U.S. market.

Rumor has it that Samsung's Galaxy S9 line will appear on the Las Vegas show floor. Since MWC, where new phones normally arrive in a cluster, is only a month away, the odds of the S9 showing up at CES are slim. The foldable and rollable phone patents Samsung has been disclosing one after another are more likely to turn up.

Casio has confirmed it will exhibit. It previously released the WSD-F20, an outdoor watch running Android Wear, and a new device is expected this year.

Garmin announced the Fenix 5 sports watch at CES 2017, with enough battery life for 24 hours of continuous GPS tracking. Garmin Pay came later. This year it can be expected to keep releasing new watches.

The connected smart city

Home accessories that connect to the internet — light bulbs, thermostats, doorbells, security cameras — are easy to buy now. Samsung even plans to introduce a smart fridge at the show that takes voice commands and places orders.

Building on that, tech companies are trying to push internet connections into products outside the home.

Deloitte Consulting has imagined a smart city of the future in which many sensors work together to make a town healthier, safer and more energy-efficient. Sensors in a river, for instance, could detect pollution such as a chemical plant leak and report it to regulators; acoustic sensors that pick up gunshots could pass the information to police right away.

Bosch's vision of a connected city is more ambitious still, with packages that cover flood warnings, an app to protect pedestrians walking at night, car sharing (with the BMW i3) and better intercity heavy-truck transport (with Mercedes-Benz).

Bosch is currently testing its flood-monitoring system on the Neckar River in Ludwigsburg, Germany. There, ultrasonic sensor probes and cameras track changes in water level, flow speed and volume. The data goes to the Bosch IoT Cloud to be assessed. When it passes a critical threshold, the system sends text warnings to the towns, residents and business owners that may be affected.

Some flood-prone cities in India and South America have already expressed interest.

Bosch also has a plan for finding parking spaces automatically, based on neighborhood parking lots: as a car drives past, it identifies and measures the gaps between parked cars and sends the data in real time to a parking map, so drivers can find an empty space.

Alexa and its rivals, everywhere

The most pervasive technology at last year's show that had no booth of its own was probably Amazon's. Alexa, the voice assistant inside Amazon Echo and Fire devices, was almost everywhere, with countless companies offering products that integrate it.

Expect the same this year. Among carmakers, BMW, Nissan and Jeep already have plans to build it in. Light bulbs, robot vacuums, home security systems, even coffee makers will work with Alexa. Sony, JBL and others have already started releasing Echoes of their own, and visitors will see more third-party smart speakers.

Google may take away some of the attention that used to belong to Amazon at this year's show. In 2016 it launched Google Home, an AI speaker that can hold its own against the Amazon Echo.

Apple's HomePod probably will not appear. The smart speaker was announced at Apple's developer conference last June and was meant to go on sale by the end of 2017, but that date has slipped to 2018, for reasons Apple has not explained.

5G, still some way off

As more and more devices come to depend on artificial intelligence, they will need faster bandwidth to move and compute data in the cloud.

From Intel and Qualcomm to AT&T and Verizon, the telecom industry will discuss 5G at the show, and how a reliable, fast, always-on next-generation wireless connection could speed up smart cities, driverless cars, even remote medicine.

Greg Roberts, an executive at the consulting firm Accenture, said: "This [5G] could be the foundation for the next generation of technological progress."

But the global wireless industry is not expected to produce a 5G standard before 2020. Telecom equipment makers and tech companies are still fighting, each wanting its own technology to become the single global standard.

There will be challenges of security, cost and privacy too, because everything will be able to connect straight to the internet.

New TVs, new technology

It is hard to say anything new about televisions, yet they will still be the main act at CES. The leading technology at the first CES was, in fact, color TV.

OLED, which people have been discussing for a decade, and 8K, which came up last year, will probably remain the words TV makers repeat. LG will release an ultra-thin OLED set.

MicroLED, a new display technology that works on principles similar to OLED, may also appear. The difference is that MicroLED replaces OLED's organic materials with inorganic ones, so the red, blue and green subpixels can be made very small. That yields higher contrast and brightness, better energy efficiency and better resistance to aging.

Burn-in on OLED screens is exactly what poor aging resistance looks like. Samsung is said to be bringing a 150-inch MicroLED television to CES.

As for 8K resolution, it is still very early. But at CES, a place built for showing off future trends, we may yet see consumer displays at 7680×4320 — about 33 million pixels.

Augmented reality takes over from virtual reality

The biggest booth in this year's augmented reality / virtual reality / mixed reality section belongs to Royole. Oculus and Magic Leap do not have booths at all.

HTC Vive has set up only an off-site space at the Wynn hotel. Having just released standalone hardware, it will most likely spend this year on new content.

At CES 2018, augmented reality will replace virtual reality at the leading edge of headset technology. With Apple's new ARKit toolkit and the spread of computer vision on smartphones, AR has become the industry's new target for research.

A startup called AiFi has demonstrated Holo Messenger, a messaging app built on Apple's ARKit that turns a user into a hologram and sends the other person an AR message — much like the holograms R2-D2 and BB-8 project in Star Wars.

Can service robots replace people?

LG has said it will show three concept robots at CES, designed for hotels, airports and supermarkets.

One, a "waiter" robot, can bring food and drinks to travelers in hotel and airport lounges. LG expects it to largely replace human waitstaff and to work around the clock.

A porter robot can handle hotel check-in and check-out and carry luggage to guest rooms. The hotel industry is already trying out machines in place of people.

A supermarket robot answers customers' price questions and walks them to the right shelf. This is not new either. At five Walmart stores in Bentonville, Arkansas, several cleaning robots have lately been sent out at the nightly shift change to clean the floors.

They were designed by Brain Corp, a company backed by SoftBank, which says it uses advanced machine-learning algorithms to navigate indoors among rows of shelves and plan cleaning routes on its own.

Honda plans to keep showing its self-propelled stool, a personal short-distance transport device we tried out at CES Asia last year; it moves by sensing shifts in the rider's center of gravity. Honda is also bringing a goofy-looking robot that delivers food.

Cover image/Polymorph Blog