At the World's Biggest Consumer Electronics Show, These 34 Products Had Something New | CES 2018 On-Site Report

Color-changing walls, robots, a suitcase that runs...

At noon local time on Friday, January 12, long lines formed in the departures area of McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. That day the four-day CES, the world's largest consumer electronics show, came to a close, and the 170,000 people who had come for it began heading home.

"It's Friday. Normally at this hour people are flying in to start their weekend. Not like now — the cars can't even move, everyone's rushing to get out of town," said the Uber driver who took our reporter to the airport.

At the check-in counters, Kerry Smart, a 63-year-old buyer from Ohio, said he had arrived on the 10th, the show's second day. "There's no need to rush here for the first day — too many people, and nothing's really new anyway." Smart runs a sporting-goods store, and this was his sixth year at CES.

The industry has run short of breakthroughs, and for several years now CES has produced nothing genuinely startling. Google showed up this year, and that didn't change it either. It sent more than 100 Google Assistant staff in white jumpsuits and knit caps out across the halls, to show visitors walking past its partners' booths how to control products by voice.

What drew the biggest crowds were mostly the booths of big companies like Google — the Google gachapon machine, LG's television gallery made of a hundred curved screens, Samsung's VR experience zone in an aisle of the main hall. Less a display of new technology than a run of large marketing events.

At CES in January 2016, Facebook's Oculus showed the consumer version of its virtual-reality headset to the public for the first time. Trying it meant a four-hour wait, and staff even urged visitors to go to Samsung's booth instead, because there was no line there at all.

But virtual reality never caught on. Mark Zuckerberg, once its loudest cheerleader, has been busy fending off accusations that it misled the world, and Oculus has skipped CES for two years running. Samsung's booth, with no significant progress to show, became the hottest VR booth at the show.

Another trend that has run for years at CES: carmakers and suppliers have turned it into an auto show that talks about technology. Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Nvidia, ZF, Valeo — carmakers and suppliers big and small filled the North Hall of the main venue, showing their work on electric vehicles and autonomous driving. Some also brought concept designs for the future of getting around.

Over four days, we picked out these 34 products worth mentioning. There are self-driving shuttle buses, voice-controlled toilets, automatic clothes-folding machines, robots to comfort sick children...

Most of them come from small companies and carmakers. Their target markets may be unclear and the technology hard to build, but at least they are interesting and original. Given time, some of them may end up touching your life.

Driverless cars are still years away, but there are already plenty of ideas about how they'll change the car once they arrive

• A self-driving vehicle that can deliver takeout on its own

At this year's CES, Toyota said it wants to turn from a car company into a mobility company. It announced its latest all-electric, self-driving smart mobility platform, e-Palette, as its newest idea of how people will get around.

It's a concept vehicle supporting Level 4 autonomous driving, and could eventually be used for ride-sharing, food delivery, car-sharing, short-distance shuttling, vending, or factory robotics, among other uses.

It's still unclear whether Toyota actually means to build these oddly shaped concept vehicles. The company says only that e-Palette is still an early-stage concept, and that it has nothing more to share on battery performance, range, rated cargo capacity, or how many people it can carry.

But it has already lined up a handful of big companies to push the project along — Uber, Didi, Pizza Hut, and Amazon are among its launch customers. Toyota plans to demonstrate the vehicle in public at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics.

• A car that is both a way to get around and a personal companion

After showing it at CES 2017 and the Tokyo Motor Show, Toyota brought the Concept-i back to CES this year — one version about the size of a minivan, the other close to a Tesla Model X.

Both are very early conceptual designs that use light, sound, and even touch to pass on driving information. Their center consoles have a single widescreen display and nothing else. As usual for Toyota, cars like this almost never reach production; read them as Toyota's idea of where electric cars and personal mobility are going.

Toyota says the series is called "Concept-i" because it wants cars to stop being cold mechanical tools and instead, through artificial intelligence, become friends to their owners — reading their moods, offering suggestions, and if need be taking over the driving and getting them to their destination safely.

• Another self-balancing motorcycle, but this one is a little different

At last year's CES, Honda showed a motorcycle that could hold itself upright. This time another big motorcycle maker, Yamaha, brought its own concept that stays upright on its own: the MOTODROiD V2.

An electric motorcycle from Yamaha that balances itself

The MOTODROiD looks very "future": a battery pack of six cylindrical cells hangs exposed under its belly, orange cables run to the rear hub motor, and its rear shock is mounted below the swingarm, the reverse of a conventional motorcycle.

The bike has a slim set of support legs on each side to keep it balanced — almost the same approach Honda took. The difference is that Honda's version was converted from an ordinary gasoline motorcycle.

In the live demo, a staff member pressed a button at the front of the bike, the kickstand under the battery pack folded up, and the bike held itself upright. A push from the side tipped it off center for an instant, and it righted itself immediately.

The specs and technical details aren't known yet. Fusillo, who commutes by motorcycle every day, said he found it hard to believe this design would be comfortable to ride, and that with no clutch, no gears, and no exhaust or engine note, "You're supposed to be riding a motorcycle — now the only thing you'll hear is the wind."

• Panasonic's self-driving concept cabin

As Tesla's battery supplier, and a co-investor in a multi-billion-dollar Gigafactory, Panasonic has been trying to remake itself into a supplier of advanced automotive parts, to escape the price war in low-margin consumer goods, smartphones included.

This time it brought a Level 5 fully autonomous concept cabin. At Level 5 there is no accelerator pedal and no steering wheel; the computer handles everything, and the car carries no human driver, only passengers. Panasonic's bet is that once that happens, the infotainment system will matter far more on the trip.

In its design, the seats face each other, and digital content shifts constantly across the side windows and the sunroof. Panasonic built three switchable settings for the cabin: "Living Room," "Business," and "Relax."

"Living Room" comes with a digital sunshade, an air purifier, and a lighting system. "Business" offers artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and video conferencing. "Relax" creates a scented space for meditation.

• New technology that lets you see through the car ahead to check the road

Valeo's MyMobius human-machine interface can learn a driver's habits and offer customized routes, adjusting the cabin's lighting and music to match.

The system also includes a subsystem called XtraVue, which draws on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication technology from Peiker, a company Valeo acquired, plus cameras on the body and laser scanners.

If both cars have XtraVue, the car in front can stream what its cameras see to the car behind in real time. From the following car's point of view, the car ahead becomes transparent, giving the driver more information about the road before overtaking and making driving safer still.

But this needs a wider build-out of 4G and eventually 5G networks, plus cities upgrading road infrastructure, so it won't go commercial any time soon. For now it is mostly tested inside geofenced closed sites, or in some small experimental town with the policies to support it.

• A self-driving vehicle and matching stop, designed for people with disabilities

Local Motors designed Olli, a bus friendly to people with disabilities, and a matching bus stop. Both carry their own small ramps to help wheelchair users board.

Using artificial intelligence and cameras and sensors installed inside and outside the vehicle and at the stops, Olli tries to read sign language from deaf and mute passengers, then puts its answer as text on screens at the front and side of the vehicle.

People with epilepsy are especially sensitive to light, so Olli is meant to adjust brightness and flicker rate for them, since light that is too bright or flickers too often can trigger a seizure. Both the stop and the cabin have large touchscreens and speakers, so passengers can pick the service they want.

If a passenger is blind, Olli uses image recognition to describe in text what it "sees" outside the window.

A staff member said they are building an experimental stop in Manchester, in the UK, to test in a closed environment. If it goes commercial, it will be deployed first in the UK and Australia.

• A self-driving taxi

The Autonom Cab, from the French company Navya, is another concept electric vehicle meant to shuttle people within a defined area, with an expected price of $250,000. But it looks set to reach the market sooner than the concepts from Toyota and Local Motors — on site we saw an Autonom Cab wearing a Nevada autonomous-vehicle plate.

The Autonom Cab has 10 lidar units, six cameras, and four radars, and carries up to six passengers a trip, three on each side facing each other. Inside are touchscreens and displays passengers can use to talk to the system — check the weather, listen to the news, look up a route. Its 22-kilowatt-hour battery keeps it running for about ten hours straight.

Navya's marketing director, Nicolas de Cremiers, told QDaily that the Autonom Cab was built for public transport; to keep the ride comfortable, its top speed is capped at 90 km/h, with a recommended cruising speed of 55 km/h.

Walls can do tricks too — they can be a screen, or a speaker

• A hologram wall

Hollywood heist movies have a familiar move: after stealing the treasure, the thief leaves a hologram in its place to fool the guards watching the cameras.

The HyperVSN hologram wall

In real life, HyperVSN, from the British startup Kino-mo, produces a strikingly convincing hologram. The thing looks like a propeller, its blades covered in programmable LEDs. When it runs, a processor in the base spins the blades and sends light signals to each LED, projecting what looks like a 3D image hanging in mid-air.

Last year Kino-mo showed an image thrown by a single base; this year it strung more than 20 bases together to project things like an F1 car, making a whole wall of holograms.

But for now the product has almost nothing to do with individual consumers — a single base costs $3,200, and it was designed for shops to promote goods.

• A neon wall that changes color when you tell it to

The main product of Nanoleaf, a smart-home lighting maker, is a light wall built from individual panels that change color at a touch. Users turn them on and off by touch, and can change color and brightness. The panels can be combined however the user likes.

This year's new idea is a remote control Nanoleaf built for the panels, supporting Google Assistant and Apple's HomeKit.

The remote has 11 faces for 11 numbers, and each numbered face can be preset to a scene or a color, controlled from an Apple device or through any speaker with Google Assistant built in.

If face No. 1 is red, the user only has to say, "Hey Google, set the wall to red (or number one)."

• Both a decorative wall and a speaker

The two walls above are only there to look at. B&O has made a wall you can listen to, priced at 4,000 euros.

The product, called BeoSound Shape, comes as a set of eight hexagonal tiles. Four are speakers, two absorb sound, one is an amplifier, and one is the BeoSound Core — a connection hub that handles AirPlay, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, and Bluetooth at once.

Cool as it looks, Shape is not for audiophiles who care about sound quality. Even B&O's brand chief, Marie Kristine Schmidt, said, "If you're an audiophile, I wouldn't recommend this system."

• An e-ink wall that can turn into emoji

A wall doesn't need bright colors to be inventive. The Japanese company DNP showed two electronic-ink (E Ink) "sensing walls" that switch between black and white, one using heat sensors, the other air sensors.

At the heat-sensing wall, a hand coming close changes the temperature, the wall detects it, and the diamond-shaped E Ink backplates flip from black to white.

At the air-sensing wall, sensors pick up the vibration of air flowing past and control the color change the same way. Once a whole wall is assembled, the color changes in sequence wherever a hand sweeps across it.

Staff on site said their products go mainly into mall posters and banner ads: the E Ink wall is programmed to the client's requirements and displays whatever content they ask for. Some clients have asked DNP to make the wall show emoji.

There was also a model on site wearing E Ink clothing from DNP, run off a single AA battery for three days straight. But DNP said this was mostly to show off the technology: "Who would be comfortable wearing that out in public..."

Google built its own CES booth for the first time, to take business from Amazon

• Google came with its voice assistant

A monorail car with "Hey Google" on its side, a 10-meter Google gachapon machine, a Google slide two stories tall, and uniformed Google staff moving through every section of the show.

It was hard for anyone at CES 2018 not to notice Google. The search giant put on such a visible show in Sin City to compete with Amazon's Alexa in the smart-home market; it has already partnered with 15 companies on new wireless speakers and home appliances.

LG, Lenovo, Sony, and JBL, for instance, have all built Google Assistant into their televisions. The northwest corner of Sony's hall had a demo area where, every 45 minutes, voice commands controlled lights, televisions, doorbells, and other objects — all of it captured and relayed by a wireless speaker with Google Assistant inside.

But none of this will let Google catch Amazon's Alexa soon: Alexa holds 70% of the smart-assistant market.

• Amazon put its one-click shopping tool, Dash, inside a refrigerator

Besides using Alexa to take the smart home, Amazon has also turned its one-click Dash Button into a tool.

Amazon released a virtual version of Dash, the Virtual Dash Button Service (VDBS) — a software development kit (SDK) that lets third-party manufacturers put a virtual Dash Button on any connected device with a screen.

Whirlpool, for example, has announced it will add Amazon's virtual Dash Button to its connected refrigerators, so shoppers can reorder food straight from the fridge's LCD screen.

• Free your hands in the bathroom — just shout for everything

Kohler's idea of the future kitchen and bathroom is, for now, concentrated in its Konnect line. Backed by Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's HomeKit, the showers, bathtubs, toilets, mirrors, and faucets in the line all take voice commands or sense their surroundings.

Say "Alexa, turn lights to 100%" and the mirror's LED strip switches to its brightest setting; a father holding a baby in both arms can say "Pour eight ounces" and the faucet pours exactly that; the shower's water temperature, pressure, steam, lighting, and background music can all be set by voice.

Beyond that, the faucet, the mirror, the bathtub, and the two smart toilets, Touchless Response and Numi, all carry sensors: they track water use and leaks, switch on a night-light mode, fill the bath automatically, flush at a wave of the hand, and, when someone comes near, turn on the foot warmer at the base of the toilet and heat the seat.

On site, though, we heard more than one person ask: I'm just going to the bathroom — why does everything have to be solved by talking to it?

It might suit some consumers with upper-limb disabilities. But if a person can do these things with their hands, why pay far more than an ordinary fixture costs to buy a smart-home version?

• A robot that folds clothes

This new product from the American startup Foldimate looks like a water cooler or a small refrigerator. It is really a machine that irons and folds clothes.

Foldimate showed a prototype back in 2016; that version was clumsy, and clothes had to be hung vertically on a rack at the top.

The new version is better: you feed clothes in flat from the top, the machine works out what kind of garment it is, then irons it at high heat and folds it accordingly, stacking each piece neatly in a drawer at the bottom. Along the way you can add fabric softener, fragrance, and other extras.

Foldimate says the machine folds 25 to 40 items at a time, two to four minutes a cycle. It handles thin things like shirts, jeans, and scarves, but heavier pieces such as coats probably won't work.

That whole sequence, though, only appeared in a video — the Foldimate we saw at CES was still a concept display. A few pieces of clothing were stuffed into the machine's inlet and outlet, but the device never ran.

A Foldimate costs $980, about 6,400 yuan, roughly what a mid-to-high-end fully automatic washing machine costs. At CES, Foldimate had already taken more than 8,000 orders.

The chronically lazy really are easy money.

• A mirror that checks your skin on voice command

How much can a mirror do?

At one CES booth we tried HiMirror, a smart vanity mirror that tests the condition of your skin.

In itself it is a vanity mirror with LED lights, so you can see more clearly while putting on makeup, and selfies taken in front of it come out better. Any LED makeup mirror does that.

HiMirror's biggest selling point is the camera above the glass. When a user stands in front of it, the camera takes a photo and analyzes their skin. For the best result the user should be makeup-free, with glasses off and forehead uncovered. So it suits the home better — a quick check each morning after getting up.

It automatically picks out dark spots, redness, wrinkles, fine lines, dark circles, and more. HiMirror staff told us the algorithm is their own: it divides the face into tens of thousands of grid cells, takes a photo, and scans the texture of each cell, reaching conclusions such as "4% dark spots in the T-zone" to judge the state of the user's skin.

Using a camera to test skin isn't new, either. Meitu's recently released AI skin test takes a photo with the phone's front camera and flash, then runs its own artificial-intelligence algorithm on it. At CES we also saw SkinScanner from Neutrogena, the skincare brand owned by Johnson & Johnson — an add-on camera for phones that likewise tests skin by taking a photo.

If there's a difference, it's that each company's algorithm is a little different.

And every company says theirs is the most accurate. Mm-hm, super accurate.

• Samsung's 146-inch modular Micro LED television

The first CES, in 1967, limited its exhibits to a few categories — television sets, radios, phonographs — so electronic entertainment products were the whole show, and the main news was the launch of integrated circuits for televisions.

Fifty-one years on, all kinds of strange and novel things have passed through the CES halls, but the state of television technology is still one of the show's most closely watched items.

Samsung brought a 146-inch modular Micro LED television. Called "The Wall," it uses micrometer-scale LEDs as individual light sources, so it needs no backlight.

Compared with a single sheet of OLED, Micro LED's modular nature lets Samsung build a television in whatever size a customer wants, and for unusual sizes — an especially giant screen, say — there is no need to worry about cutting the panel.

Samsung refused to answer technical questions on site and banned photography, saying only that it would hold a launch event this March to announce the product formally.

These products are about health

• Aurasens's music massage chair, swaying to the beat

Even a chair can offer an "immersive experience" — that is what the French company Aurasens set out to do.

At CES the company showed a massage chair that moves with the music. From the outside it looks exactly like the massage sofas in shopping malls; switched on, it is another thing entirely.

Inside the chair, 32 massage rollers vibrate entirely in time with the music. Aurasens curates a set of songs and choreographs a matching massage rhythm for each; the playlist is updated monthly, so in theory you can't just plug in an iPhone and get a massage to your own music.

Put on noise-canceling headphones and an eye mask, and you follow the music's rise and fall as the pressure changes with it — a symphony played on your back. Enjoying it is not cheap: Aurasens costs $20,000 (about 130,000 yuan), which really is too much.

• Sleep headphones to help you rest easy

White noise has been shown to help people relax and fall asleep. Apps play soothing sounds; hardware makers have come at it from another angle with small accessories.

The French company Rythm showed a headband called Dreem. You wear it to bed, and it plays white noise through bone-conduction earphones.

You never have to adjust or switch off the sound by hand: while you sleep, Dreem tracks your brain waves in real time and changes the volume and intensity to match.

It doubles as an alarm clock. Set a time window and it will wake you with sound only when it detects light sleep, which makes getting up a bit easier.

The point of all this is deeper sleep. Rythm says the headband increases deep-sleep time by 32%.

Philips launched a similar headband at CES too, called SleepSmart.

• A mobility scooter on omnidirectional wheels

Whill's electric wheelchair won last year's Best Accessibility Tech award at CES. This year the company launched the lighter, cleaner-looking Model Ci, priced at $4,000.

The Whill mobility scooter

The Ci runs on a lithium battery, 16 km on a charge, with a top speed of 9 km/h — about twice a normal adult's walking pace. It breaks into three modular parts, so it fits in a car trunk and can be put back together at the other end.

Its two front wheels are omnidirectional, each made of 24 independent rollers, so the chair can move in any direction, including turning circles on the spot. The left armrest has a three-speed selector and a stop lever; the right has an eight-way joystick for steering.

In our test the Whill took no learning at all. On the staff's advice we got used to the controls in first gear, then crossed a gravel path in second. Given the size of the venue and the flow of people, we didn't try third.

Whill's staff, though, said they don't call the Ci a "wheelchair" but a "personal light mobility device." The new model is faster and more responsive, and people with disabilities often lack the strength to handle it, so on rough ground it could tip over.

We didn't feel that during the test, but for Whill's target customers — older people — it may be another matter.

Some new cameras, none of them about the spec sheet

When do you actually use a camera to take a picture? A 2017 report from the photo community Flickr showed smartphones accounted for 50% of the devices used for photography, and DSLRs 33%. The iPhone again topped the list as the most popular camera.

At this year's CES, the old camera makers wanted us to recover some of our memories of cameras, and went retro.

• Polaroid has a new camera again

Polaroid was founded in 1937. As digital swept in, this veteran instant-camera brand was carved up, sold, and bankrupted more than once. In May 2017, The Impossible Project bought Polaroid and what was left of its digital camera business, and launched a new brand, Polaroid Originals.

That makes Polaroid feel more like a streetwear label out of the fashion business, and what it sells still runs on the design elements Polaroid was once famous for.

This time Polaroid showed the new OneStep 2 instant camera at CES, shaped exactly like the OneStep of 40 years ago; the company itself advertises it as "a classic returns."

The OneStep 2 is the classic made digital: it charges over USB, carries a high-quality lens that focuses from 0.61 m to infinity, has a built-in flash and a selfie mode, and its rechargeable battery lasts 60 days on a charge.

A OneStep 2 sells for $99, about 650 yuan.

• Kodak's film scanner, the KODAK SCANZA

Kodak is also trying to bring a classic back to life.

The one-time film giant showed a small film scanner at CES, the KODAK SCANZA, which turns film into digital files without developing it.

The device, about the size of a flowerpot, has a screen and comes with HDMI output, USB, an SD card slot, and other ports. Feed film in from the bottom and it scans the images and shows them on the screen; from there you can send them to a PC over a USB cable or save them to an SD card. It is the developing stage, turned into digital pictures.

Kodak has been trying to revive its old film business — last year media reports said Kodak was about to restart production of its Ektachrome line for the small professional photography market. Kodak launched Ektachrome in the 1940s and discontinued it in 2012.

But Kodak may not be at ease in the digital wave any more. Take the KODAK SCANZA: this device that preaches retro is itself retro in one respect — it has no wireless transfer.

• Kodak's 360-degree portrait scanner

Besides going retro, Kodak also showed front-line 3D scanning at CES.

It is a joint product with the American startup Twindom, a 3D-scanning company that builds 3D virtual avatars of individuals.

The scanner they built with Kodak is a portable studio workstation. Its cameras and set can be taken apart and moved at any time. The kit includes 89 camera sensors, 25 LED projector sensors, 16 LED light strips, and other equipment.

It is best set up out of direct sunlight; the whole configuration takes 30 minutes, and once built there is room inside for two people to stand.

With Twindom's technology, a person standing inside gets a high-resolution full-body 3D scan, the scanning itself done in as little as 0.25 seconds.

Afterward you get a 3D photo to share on social networks. Or you can take Kodak's 3D-printing service and have a figurine of yourself printed, which arrives in one to two weeks.

And four robots, each a different shape

• Honda's four goofy-cute siblings

Honda brought four robot products this time, called the 3E series, for Empower, Experience, Empathy. All of them are said to have automatic navigation, and two can carry heavy loads.

The 3E-D18 is built on Honda's ATV chassis, with GPS, a custom track system, and four-wheel-drive electric power, for construction, firefighting, search and rescue, and other work where heavy things have to be moved.

Another, the 3E-C18, uses a modular design with a removable battery. When it came out, the screen on its front showed the word HELLO, then it blinked, though most of the time it just shows two round eyes. Honda says on its website that this robot can sell goods and carry advertising.

The 3E-B18 is aimed at older people and people with disabilities. It keeps the seat level while climbing a slope, and with attachments it converts into a luggage cart or a stroller.

The other one, the 3E-A18, is essentially for the home. With a screen and a fairly soft outer skin, the 3E-A18 is meant, in Honda's words, to "invite people to touch or hug the robot." Honda says it can read users' expressions through its camera.

All of these products are modular, so parts can be swapped quickly.

• A tiny programmable robot

Ozobot, founded in 2015, brought an upgraded version of its small Evo robot, priced at $90.

There are two ways to play with it. One is to program a route: stickers and markers set a path that makes Evo turn, double back, or go straight. This is Color Codes, a graphical programming tool Ozobot developed. The other is to hold it and lead Evo along with your finger.

Its products have reached 10,000 classrooms, and there are 27 different characters so far, among them a robot dog, a unicorn, and Marvel superheroes.

• The revived Sony Aibo robot dog

Since the 1990s, the robot dog Sony developed with Aibo has probably been the most famous intellectual property in interactive toys. Now Sony's new robot dog is here. The two are working together again to bring the classic back.

The new Sony dog, Aibo, has touch sensors on its head, chin, and back, and responds differently depending on how hard it is petted. With 22 axes of movement, Aibo moves more nimbly. Its eyes are OLED displays that can blink and turn, and a camera on its nose recognizes family members.

As for the price: 198,000 yen, about 13,000 yuan. Still pretty expensive.

• A robot to comfort sick children

A child's world ought to be full of color. They should be carefree, playing as they please with parents, relatives, and other children.

But misfortune finds some children anyway. They may fall gravely ill very young, spend all day in hospital, and open their eyes each morning to sort out that day's medication or count down what's left of their lives — however you put it, it sounds bleak.

The robotics expert Aaron Horowitz and his company built a robotic plush duck called Aflac.

It has five touch sensors, on its cheeks, under its wings, and on its back. When a child curls up with it, the duck answers with happy quacking.

Tucked into its chest is an accessory pack of near-field tags. Children can put any emoji tag on the duck's chest to show how they feel that day, and the duck mimics them with happy chirps or pained groans.

Aaron Horowitz is now working to give the ducks free to children diagnosed with cancer across the United States, with a cancer treatment center in Atlanta as the first partner.

These small things (some not so small) are worth a look too

• A carry-on suitcase you can ride like a scooter at the airport

At CES, the Modobag smart suitcase had already sold several hundred units. It is a wheeled bag that drives itself, about 9 kg; pull out the handle and it becomes a small electric vehicle, so you can ride it when you're pressed for time at the airport.

Modobag staff told QDaily that the suitcase uses a NanoSafe battery, which replaces graphite with a nano-titanate material for better thermal stability, making it less likely to catch fire or explode. It is certified by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and can go on a plane in the U.S. as hand luggage, without being checked.

The Modobag does 5 mph indoors and 8 mph outdoors. Fully charged, the bag has a range of 8 miles, and 15 minutes brings it back to 80%. There is also a USB port on the body, so you can charge your electronics with it while traveling.

From our test at the show, beyond worrying that the bag doesn't hold quite enough, we worried more that even though Modobag says it is certified, with security checks getting stricter all the time, it could still be stopped at the gate.

A Modobag isn't cheap: the current crowdfunding price is $1,495, about 9,600 yuan.

• Under-display fingerprint recognition has a real product

vivo had a booth of under 2 square meters at CES, where it showed a phone with under-display fingerprint recognition built on technology from Synaptics, a recognition-technology company.

Hands-on with vivo's under-display fingerprint sensor

A single 6.43-inch OLED display covers the whole front of the engineering unit, with none of the notch on the iPhone X or the Essential Phone. Near where the Home button sits on a conventional front-fingerprint phone, an always-on fingerprint icon tells the user where to put a finger to unlock.

Enrolling a fingerprint on the under-display optical sensor still takes several presses, in two stages — the second stage asks the user to record the edges of the fingerprint — and each press comes with vibration feedback from a linear motor. vivo does require more presses than phones with conventional capacitive sensors, such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge or the iPhone 7.

In our test the phone took about 0.7-0.8 seconds to unlock and reach the home screen, slower than the iPhone's Touch ID. But because the iPhone plays a transition animation when it unlocks, the two look about equally fast — a neat trick on vivo's part.

Synaptics' method works like this: the sensor picks up the pressure of the finger, then blue-green light shines from under the display onto the fingertip, and the pattern of the fingerprint reflects back to the receiving sensor to be matched, completing the unlock. The success rate drops a lot when the finger is wet, somewhat like Apple's first-generation Touch ID.

vivo says it will make "several million" phones with under-display fingerprint recognition in 2018. By vivo's usual output, that is a very small number.

• A high-definition pocket scanner

Free phone apps can scan documents too — so why buy a $300 (about 2,000 yuan) scanning pen? The French company 7Next showed its new product, Pup Scan, at CES; the pen's selling point is "One Click."

The Pup Scan pen is 13.5 cm tall and 0.36 cm wide, small enough to slip into a pocket. One end holds a camera with two flashes and a laser emitter. On the side is a small touchscreen, used to pick the working mode and where the scanned file goes — AirDrop, email, the cloud, various social networks.

Hold the pen up to the document you want to scan and it throws four laser lines to frame the area; adjust up, down, left, or right, press the button at the other end, and the scan is done.

Nothing else is needed — the document flies off on its own to wherever you chose.

Pup Scan says that besides being convenient, its images are better than a smartphone's. Pup Scan is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo and has raised more than three times its target.

• Sony's Xperia Ear open earphones

Noise-canceling headphones cut you off from the world. Sony wants to go the other way, and not let earphones block outside sound.

Earphone makers, Sony included, have put microphones on earphones before, but the concept earphone Sony showed at CES, the Xperia Ear, took the most primitive route — hollow out the earphone to leave a hole, and turn the speaker that goes into the ear into a ring, so outside sound and the earphone's own sound reach the ear at the same time.

Sony reckons this way people can keep the earphones in and still talk to someone without obstruction, with no worry about not hearing them.

You can't expect much sound quality from earphones like these, of course, and that was never the point of the Xperia Ear. Sony's concept is a reminder not to cut yourself off from the real world while you are deep in music.

More practically, crossing the street, cycling, or arriving somewhere unfamiliar might all call for earphones like this.

The look is just a bit odd. Because it is a wireless earphone, the hollowed-out piece is still attached to a block holding the battery and the Bluetooth module, and clipped onto the ear, it looks strange from every angle.

Cover image and in-line photos taken on site by QDaily.