CES 2013 gets weird – The Verge

Ke$ha and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad CES corporate afterparty

2013-01-10T17:47:51-05:00

ces kesha trent

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 murd …

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Winbot 7 window cleaning robot uses a vacuum seal to stick to the glass

2013-01-10T14:55:51-05:00

Gallery Photo:

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 i …

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The weird and wild interfaces of CES 2013

2013-01-10T09:30:05-05:00

A CES-goer tries out Haier's gesture control TV

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 righ …

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We Found Fur In an iPhone Case: How a little bunny brightened a dark day at CES

2013-01-09T18:38:06-05:00

ces fur trent lead

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 …

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StickNFind Bluetooth stickers let you track any object with your phone

2013-01-09T18:17:29-05:00

sticknfind

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 des …

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Release your inner cross dresser with the future of advertising

2013-01-09T07:45:03-05:00

FaceCake Swivel

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 …

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At CES, Thomas Edison materializes in the mist to help you win a free iPad

2013-01-09T01:25:25-05:00

Tom Warren ghost hunter

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.

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What it’s like to drive a 1600-pound mechanical spider

2013-01-08T17:53:03-05:00

eatart mondo spider

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 e …

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The future is now, the future is weird: an expedition into the dark heart of CES

2013-01-07T08:05:04-05:00

ces past trent lead

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 multip …

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Ion Audio’s Scratch 2 Go can turn you into a suction-cup DJ (hands-on)

2013-01-06T20:12:10-05:00

Gallery Photo: Ion Audio Scratch 2 Go DJ hands-on images

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, …

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