CES 2013 gets weird

Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the latest in the series.

For two years in high school I was a cashier at Whole Foods. We were at a busy intersection right in the middle of three fancy prep schools, so we maintained a pretty steady flow of soccer moms doing wheatgrass shots or going really hard at the salad bar with each other all day long. My supervisor, the Front End Team Leader Eric, was one of those smart middle-aged Whole Foods dudes who seemed like he could be doing much more but had gotten fucked over in life somehow and was now a powerful combination of grateful that he had any job at all and murderously spiteful that he had to wear an apron to work every day. He taught me a lot of lessons, from the practical (where to find the just-expired burritos before they went to the landfill) to the subtly profound. During the lulls in traffic when his team was prone to long bathroom breaks and back-alley bonghits, he’d saunter, clipboard in hand, down the row of cashiers. He’d stop right at the end of your station, lean in, and look you in the eyes. “If you’re not busy,†he’d say in a low rumble, a half-evil grin twisting up into his face, “look busy.†Then he’d slowly moonwalk towards the door, keeping his eyes locked, clicking his pen like a mental patient, until he got outside, where he’d do a spin and casually collect all the misplaced shopping carts in the parking lot. Fuckin’ Eric, man. I wonder if he’s on facebook.

Robots are supposed to do our dirty work, so why not have them deal with the unenviable task of cleaning the outsides of our windows? It’s certainly been done before, but here at CES 2013 we’ve just had the opportunity to try out a new model, the Winbot 7 from Ecovacs. Like a Roomba (as well as other window-cleaning robot competitors), the Winbot 7 automatically moves along your window surface while cleaning and squeegeeing the glass. What makes this robot better than the rest is that it uses a vacuum seal to stick onto the window instead of a separate magnet piece that similar products use.

To clean a window using the Winbot, you plug it in to a power port, spray the cleaning pads with a solution, place it against the window, and turn it on. The vacuum then grabs hold, and the robot will first drive down to the bottom of the window frame (and then the top) to measure the surface. From there, it zig-zags to clean the entire window before returning to its original location. The Winbot only does this one pre-programmed route, though if you’d like to control it manually there is a remote. If you’re a bit afraid of sticking a robot onto your window, Ecovacs tells us that the robot has a backup battery that will maintain suction in the event of a power outage while the Winbot drives down to the bottom of the window. There’s also a suction cup connected to the cord that will prevent the robot falling to the ground should the connection fail.

The public side of CES may all about showing off consumer gadgetry, but there’s another, more lucrative CES going on behind the scenes. If you toured the private meeting rooms of the South Hall instead of the display booths, you’d find dozens of small manufacturers pitching themselves to the behemoths of the tech world, angling for an OEM deal or a partnership or even an acquisition. This year, the hottest commodity is a new take on UI. Depth cameras, gaze trackers, motion sensors: the weirder, the better. Forced to compete with a flood of touchscreens, PC makers are increasingly desperate for an edge on interaction design — and for the right price, small firms are happy to deliver it.

Tobii is a prime example. It’s a gaze-tracking device, using sensors to build a 3D model of your eye and track exactly which part of the screen you’re looking at. It could serve as base hardware for all sorts of cool UI tricks, like a map that zooms to whichever spot you’re looking at, or a TV that auto-mutes when you look away. With enough money and enough clout, it’s easy to imagine a day when every laptop has one. For a PC market that’s increasingly starved for innovation, that’s too attractive to pass up.

Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the next in the series.

As LL Cool J took the stage at Sony’s massive exhibition space I was ready to pronounce this year’s CES dead on arrival. He was there to hype his regrettably-named music collaboration software Boomdizzle, throwing around generic technology terms with all the panache of a door-to-door vacuum salesman, the performance nowhere near as nuanced as his Special Agent Hanna in NCIS:LA’s. There was precious little actual information about how his international jam sesh enabler would perform differently from the myriad of programs already available that do the same thing. I could feel that his cool, cool heart wasn’t in it for anything more than a couple extra thou chilling in his bank account.

If you’re the sort of person who’s always losing their keys, Sticknfind may be your solution. The project, which has currently passed its Indiegogo funding goal by over 900 percent, pairs an iPhone or Android app with 4.1mm-thin “location stickers” that work with Bluetooth 4.0 and can attach to almost anything. The idea is that you’ll be able to track any object within a range of 100 feet — battery life is said to be around a year.

Through the app you can see how far away the sticker is and make it buzz or beep remotely. You can also set it up to send phone notifications when the sticker goes within or outside a certain range. The app’s design is pretty slapdash, but seemed to work well enough; pings happened quickly, and the radar-style screen updated itself regularly. Sticknfind will ship next month — you’ll get two stickers for $49.99.

Remember how ads in Minority Report were interactive? We’ve just played with a demo unit of such a system here at CES 2013; it’s called Swivel digital signage, and it uses a Kinect sensor to place clothes and accessories onto passersby. The idea is that advertisers that use digital signage will not just show static images of models wearing clothes. Instead, as people walk up to the sign, they’ll get to virtually “try on” the clothing. To do so, the company behind Swivel, FaceCake, scans and measures clothes in-house. When a user steps up to the advertisement, the Kinect sensor analyzes the person, chooses the appropriate size, and layers it on his body. It’s not the first time we’ve seen the technology — FaceCake demonstrated the Swivel digital wardrobe with Microsoft at last year’s CES, and it later made it into a 20-store Bloomingdale’s trial last fall.

So, how does it feel to virtually slip into a dress? Well, it’s certainly capable of inducing some giggles. We wouldn’t necessarily rely on the tool to aid us in piecing together our next outfit, but it is a bit liberating to be able to visualize yourself anything you want — wedding dresses included — without worrying about going to a store. And, undoubtedly, the laughs that will ensue will make it well worth your while to step up to one of these ads and see just what you’d look like with a cowboy hat on. If clothing is a bit too tame, the company has also introduced Swivel Up Close, which lets you try out makeup, earrings, and glasses in the same way. In all, both systems work fairly well — it’s most impressive when clothing and accessories turn in 3D space as you rotate — but making selections with gestures remains as difficult as always, and items don’t always stick to your body perfectly. If you’d like to give it a try, FaceCake tells us its digital wardrobe will make it back into some Bloomingdale’s stores later this year.

They say the ghosts of CES past sometimes roam the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Lonely souls, forever trapped in show floor purgatory, searching for someone — anyone — to free them from existential limbo. Sometimes that ghost is Thomas Edison, and this year, he wants to help you win a free iPad. But not before he shoots off another tweet from the aether.

Today I was lucky enough to experience driving the Mondo Spider, a 1600 lb, five foot-tall and eight foot-long mechanical spider powered by hydraulics. The spider was built in 2006 by eatART, a non-profit in Vancouver, B.C, and can move at up to four feet per second. The spider used to run on gas, but was retrofitted in 2009 with a 5 kWh Lithium Ion battery, so like any Chevy Volt, you only need a wall outlet to charge it up. “It is the world’s first zero-emission walking vehicle,” eatART claims. Lenovo loved the Mondo Spider’s appeal as a statement about energy consumption, and shipped it up to CES this week.

Driving the Mondo Spider is exhilarating, but also a bit scary. Gears and hydraulics pulse and buzz at your ears as you push and pull on the two skull-topped throttles. The Spider operates just like a tractor, meaning each throttle controls one side of the vehicle. Both throttles forward propel you forward, and both throttles back send you backwards. Putting either throttle forward and the other backward rotates you laterally. It’s surprisingly intuitive, and took no time at all to pick up. It also felt shockingly safe. I expected to at some point fear for my life (or for the life of others), but that moment never came.

Trent Wolbe will be publishing daily photo essays from CES. This is the first in the series.

These days it seems like everyone is all about meeting up and nerding out. Music junkies lose their minds in the K-hole that Austin becomes every March, comic nerds let their freak flags fly in San Diego. Elite film appreciators flock to Robert Redford’s serene retreat in Park City, supreme art assholes learn about the future of being a supreme art asshole at Art Basel. The conference-festivals (sure, let’s call them confests) have become a subculture all their own, spawning whole economies and copycat events dealing with the microgenres that multiply and thrive in our modern information economy.

Last year at CES Ion Audio showed off an iPad hardware peripheral to give aspiring DJs a better way to control music on their tablets, and this year the company is back with another approach — using suction cups. Scratch 2 Go is a set of controls that users physically stick onto the face of their iPad, giving them a tactile experience without taking their fingers off the screen. Five different controls are provided: a crossbar for switching between tracks, two scrubbers for scratching your favorite MP3s, and two pairs of control knobs, ideally suited for controlling the EQ of each respective track.

Under each controller there’s a small nub, similar to what you’d see on a stylus — so they’re basically just replicating what touching the screen with your finger would do. This opens up what kind of DJ apps you can use the controls with — anything that has knobs and turntables that line up should work — though Ion Audio does offer its own iDJ 2 Go app. The controls stick easily enough to the surface of the device, and seem to offer just the right amount of resistance when removing them; not enough to get knocked off too easily, but not so strong that you’ll be deterred from yanking them off if you want to watch a movie on your iPad.

Parrot, the company responsible for the well-known AR Drone, is working to make gardening easier with its brand new Flower Power project. Simply place the Flower Power device — which looks like a colorful leek — in the soil near any of your plants, pair the device with your iPhone or iPad, and you can track all of your plants’ needs from anywhere. Once you’ve paired the device with your phone or tablet, you can choose your plant from a library of about 6000 plants, and if you’re not certain of your plant’s name, you can search by leaf type, color, and a number of other options.

The device updates the app every 15 minutes with information on how much sunlight your plant gets, its temperature, how wet the soil is, and whether or not it needs to be fertilized. The user-friendly interface displays this information in little bubbles that will flash red and send a push notification when your plants need immediate attention, plots the information in a graph so you can keep track of your plants’ long-term progress, and best of all, creates a to-do list for all of your plants’ needs so you’ll never forget to water them.

One of the wildest and most whimsical gadgets we’ve seen in quite a while is here on the show floor at CES: the Hapifork. It’s a “smart fork” that has a Bluetooth radio, a capacitive sensor, and a vibration motor built in. The idea is that as you eat, every time the fork touches your mouth it triggers the sensor, measuring your bites on the app. If you eat too quickly, the fork vibrates to tell you to slow down.

French creator Hapilabs’ contention is that eating too fast is a cause of weight gain, so a smart fork that slows you down will help you lose weight. The fork pairs with a mobile app that not only tracks every bite, but also when your meal begins, ends, and even how long each “fork duration” is — how long it takes to actually move the food from the plate to your maw.