What really mattered at CES, and why

The world’s largest consumer tech show has cleared the floor until next year. Apart from the weird and the wonderful, several products show what’s next for technology. Will it be hype or reality?

Every year, Qualcomm, the company that makes all the Snapdragon processors in your phone, delivers a much attended keynote that points the way forward for technology. This year, Qualcomm’s CEO Stephen Mollenkopf made a big claim — 5G is no iteration over 4G or anything that went before it. It’s going to make such a difference that it will be as revolutionising as the invention of electricity or the automobile. Mollenkopf said that 5G would really connect the world together in a way that will enable all that Virtual Reality streaming, autonomous cars that respond instantly, and connected smart cities. He said this kind of connectivity would mean ‘affecting entire economies and benefiting entire societies’. 5G connectivity will be fast enough to download a 4K movie in 18 seconds. But its more important impact will be on how it reduces the reaction time or latency for connected actions. You can’t issue an instruction to your vehicle and then have to wait, even a few seconds, for a response. That’s a dangerous situation. It’s 5G that will reduce that time to a millisecond.

In this context, Qualcomm unveiled its next processor, the Snapdragon 835, which is what will work on a variety of devices to make high speed processing in the 5G era possible. Think Internet of Things. All the connected things around us will be able to communicate in real time because of that fast connectivity and fast processing.

Of course, our internet infrastructure will have to keep pace to support that speed and until then, we must live in hope.

Rather than Virtual Reality, it’s Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality that have shone at CES. Some stunning applications of AR have in particular been demonstrated with connected cars.

Hartman has a connected vehicle solution that shows how all sorts of information can be shown on the windscreen in a way that increases safety for the driver. The content displayed would include street signs that are picked up by the GPS, and information on other vehicles and pedestrians nearby from what the car’s sensors gather. A head up display that will show such information more safely is planned. Companies Continental and DigiLens used projection over a large part of the screen to show contextual information from the car’s sensors including about the car itself.

The possibilities with projecting information in different ways are many and actually ready to get into commercial use. It would bring aspects of autonomous driving into actual use. Nvidia, Audi, BMW, Bosch, Chrysler, and other companies all showed similar concepts pointing to a clear trend in car and driving tech. Bosch, in fact, has taken things up a notch by using gesture control and haptic feedback to control the car.

If the past year was when virtual assistants were introduced to the world, this year will be when they will start to appear everywhere. Amazon’s Echo speaker with the Alexa virtual assistant was clearly a game changer. Dozens of devices are becoming compatible with Amazon’s Alexa. This isn’t available in India yet, but the trend is very clear and it’s a matter of time before Alexa, or other virtual assistants, are built into products here as well — including cars and robots. Alexa does have rivals, the Google Assistant, Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, for example, and the potential of voice recognition and control is coming into its own as advances are made in artificial intelligence. Alexa is being seen as a computing platform in itself — no screens needed. LG has made an Alexa-controllable fridge, for instance and Ford is getting Alexa integration. This is the kind of tech which will make it possible to control devices that don’t and can't have a screen using your voice.

If you’ve been hearing too much about robots doing this and that, there’s a good reason. They are. And so they had to be all over CES at Las Vegas. The enduring image from the show will be of a shy looking robot made by LG, an extremely cute looking gizmo with a round face. It’s a smart home hub and is Alexa powered which means it will go about doing your bidding. LG may well come up with its own assistant for the robot and other devices by the time it reaches production. Because AI is at the heart of everything happening right now, the robot will keep learning and adjusting to users’ demands. The Hub Robot isn’t the only one from LG which also showcased a robot that will guide people at airports and one that will look after your garden. A number of other robots, household and educational, showed up at CES.

Plenty of phones, laptops and TVs launched at CES and unlike some concept products, those we are likely to see in the coming months.

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