CES 2016 Day 4: Highlights from the show floor – The Verge

Get $200 off an Oculus Rift with Dell’s new PC bundles

2016-01-07T23:00:02-05:00

The Oculus Rift's $599 price has been a tough pill to swallow for many, but there's already a way in which you can slice it down to a more reasonable size: buy the Rift with a Dell or Alienware PC. Here at CES, Dell has just announced that it will take $200 off the price of purchasing a Rift VR headset with one of its certified Oculus Ready PCs.

$599 + $1,199 = $1,598

So far, there are only three PC makers approved to carry the Oculus Ready branding - Dell, Alienware, and Asus - and two of them are technically the same company. Dell is capitalizing on that leading position now by opening orders for its Oculus Rift bundles, which are built ar …

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The Verge staff loves Hugh Jackman so much more than he knows

2016-01-07T22:49:02-05:00

It's day four of The Verge's time at CES 2016, and morale is not ideal. It's not that we don't love our jobs, and cool gadgets, and writing content for all of you, it's just that we fucking hate being awake for 20 hours a day. You can understand.

Also: after four days of refusing to eat the salad, our choices have come back to haunt us.

We despaired of finding solutions to the mid-CES blues, until a fateful retweet led us to the Twitter account of famous Australian, X-Man, Tony's host, and smiler, Hugh Jackman. Hugh Jackman is a delight, as you may already know from any time you have seen him do anything.

Hugh Jackman is our CES boyfriend

…

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Lenovo is making the first consumer phone with Google’s Project Tango

2016-01-07T21:52:07-05:00

Project Tango is moving from experiment to a feature that Lenovo hopes will sell phones. Tonight at CES, Lenovo and Google have announced that the former will be the first manufacturer to release a consumer handset with Project Tango built in. And there's already a release date: it's coming this summer. The device will cost under $500 and will launch globally, according to both companies. Also interesting is that Lenovo and Google have said it'll be "less than 6.5 inches" in size. Tango, unveiled nearly two years ago, allows devices to map the 3D space around them in real time using a combination of cameras and sensors. If you need a refresh …

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GoPro plans to release a 360-degree camera for consumers

2016-01-07T21:33:35-05:00

Just a few days after Nikon announced a 360-degree camera here at CES, GoPro appears to be ready to do the same. During YouTube's keynote presentation at CES this evening, GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said the company plans to release a "more casual" spherical camera sometime soon.

GoPro announced two spherical camera rigs capable of shooting 360-degree and 3D video for virtual reality last year at the Code Conference, but they are expensive products meant specifically for pro videographers. Since then, GoPro has made a steady stream of high-quality 360-degree videos using those rigs, and in fact Woodman was on stage with YouTube to announce that …

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US Marshals raided a Chinese electric skateboard company at CES

2016-01-07T20:31:31-05:00

US Marshals raided the CES booth of a Chinese electric skateboard company today on the grounds it was showing off a product patented by another company, according to a report in Bloomberg. The device, a one-wheeled self-balancing skateboard called the Trotter, is made by Changzhou First International Trade, and the marshals confiscated it and every piece of promotional material at the booth. Future Motion, a Silicon Valley startup that makes a similar one-wheeled electric skateboard, says it has a patent on the product and sent the marshals alongside its legal team to shut down the copycat.

Future Motion's device is called the OneWheel, and …

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Amazon’s stealth takeover of the smart home at CES 2016

2016-01-07T18:58:31-05:00

Of all the forecasts made here at CES, the smart home feels like one of the nearest to coming true. Nearly every big-name technology brand, from Google to Samsung to LG, is in the process of trying to own the way we interact with our appliances and our appliances interact with each other. But the most important name in the smart home is the one you're least likely to find plastered inside the cavernous halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center: Alexa.

The name corresponds to Amazon's cloud-based voice assistant, which began as the personal assistant inside the online shopping company's Echo speaker that went on sale to the public in June. Ov …

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Why Intel and Vox Media are teaming up to stop online harassment

2016-01-07T18:57:00-05:00

A year after pledging $300 million toward diversity initiatives, Intel is launching a new project that focuses on one element of the problem: online abuse.

The Hack Harassment initiative - launched in partnership with our sister site Recode, our parent company Vox Media, and Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation - is an attempt to find solutions to internet harassment, starting with a series of hackathons through the first half of 2016. Held both online and offline, the sessions will involve members of the tech industry, the media, the nonprofit world, and academia. They're designed to raise awareness and find potential technological solutio …

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Panasonic’s transparent display is hard for your eyes to believe

2016-01-07T18:43:42-05:00

Transparent displays aren't really new in the technology industry, but this year at CES we're seeing some pretty amazing examples of them. There's LG's 18-inch display, which you can roll up like paper. And I just stopped by Panasonic's booth to check out the company's own transparent display. Unlike LG's, this one's not small enough to hold in your hand; it's meant for the living room. Panasonic's demo showcases the display attached to shelving with various home decor behind it. The wood you see beneath the glass is actually where all the technology is. Inside are micro LEDs that beam out the picture to the glass panel, which isn't complete …

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Kodak’s CEO gave me the coolest business card I’ve ever seen

2016-01-07T17:54:05-05:00

Kodak dropped one of the most interesting announcements of CES this week when it unveiled a Super 8 camera - yes, one that uses real 8mm film. It's the first one Kodak's made since 1982, and it's an extremely welcome improvement over the awful, random products that have carried the Kodak brand in recent years.

I spent a few minutes speaking to Kodak's CEO Jeff Clarke yesterday about why the company made the camera (which you can watch below). Moments before he jumped on stage, both he and Kodak's global chief marketing officer handed me their business cards - which, yes, is still a thing that happens at CES - and I went weak in the knees. N …

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I just built an Audi R8 on the moon

2016-01-07T17:11:59-05:00

The window for writing earnest "holy crap, VR is amazing" pieces largely closed years ago. We've written them ad nauseam, others have done the same (and for good reason, of course - VR is going to be one of the most transformative technologies of the next decade). Many of these pieces are great; some come about as close to conveying the experience of putting on modern, high-resolution, low-latency VR goggles as they possibly could without physically handing you a pair of your own to try on.

Now, as with drones, the conversation is shifting away from the whiz-bang of great VR hardware to applications. Cool, VR is usable now. What do we do wi …

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