Intertwixt 18: Immersed in the Desert

The dry, cold winds are deceiving. Sometimes the strip in Las Vegas in January feels like it’s the return of springtime, and other moments it’s an icy chill that threatens to blow my badge over my head, over the bridge, onto the streets where the endless hotels drift away.

What year is it? Here it’s always the same. About 20 or more of these under my belt, I’ve lost count, and the past and present and future blend. Time expands and contracts. Day 0 feels like forever, and then it’s over. And in the first full week of January in a new year, when everything in America keeps feeling unspeakably awful, well, it’s hard to balance your mind in a maze of tech.

The winners of Best of CES were found, and yet it’s a hard show to even feel like you’ve seen properly. There’s no way to “see” all of CES. It’s too many hotels and endless halls, too few days. You pick what you can, roll the dice, accept the path you took. CES the role-playing game. CES the tarot deck. 

And it’s not even close to a snapshot of tech itself. Companies hold back their winning hands. It’s poker. New pitches and existing products hiding side by side. Big tech giving sly glimpses, only some cards visible. In my experience, new things come as soon as a week after. CES drifts away like a fever dream. Wisps of it remain. And in the middle, so many friends and colleagues and people from the past and future who pop up in ways you’d never expect.

Too much to discuss here, but a few things that linger with me…

Lego Smart Bricks wowed me because they’re sensor-studded and can auto-recognize other bricks and smart tags and minifigures, emergently, synthesizing music, or flashing lights. Accelerometer, Bluetooth, magnetic coils, microphone, optical sensor. They measure spatial distance and proximity. They work without a phone app. They’ll be in Star Wars sets in March, but who knows what else next? I see whole networks of these, smart interactive spaces like theme parks, where these bricks can do things. Buttons and sensors and maybe robots. Unlike older Lego sets which were more app-connected, these are starting to work on their own, reliably, independently.

An experimental hyper-local wireless network protocol called Wi-R, by Iyana, that radiates in your body and can recognize wristbands, earbuds, pendants, glasses, rings that are on you. Interconnect with low latency and less interference. Used in military projects now, aiming for a consumer protocol. Because connected things now fail out, hit limits. I wore the demo prototypes. Body networks that self-assemble and stay connected? Can it be done?

AI lives out among us like experimental glue, floppy and powerful, living in data centers that are being aggressively overexpanded at an impossible pace. What about the small things near us, the edge as it’s called. What do we do, what are we with it, how do we connect. No one’s doing enough work on that, it seems. How does it interconnect? How do all the things interconnect?

Spheres and Omega marts and Interstellar arcs and Meta neural bands that connect to car cabins…the immersive demos I saw in Vegas melted together. I looked at little wearable things at CES, but in my free time I also went over to see The Sphere for the first time (for a Lenovo press conference), and also wander Area 15 — to check out Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart again, and experience the new location-mapped VR experience Interstellar Arc.

The Sphere, after finally trying it for myself, feels like a big VR headset. Or, a planetarium meets super-IMAX. I wasn’t exactly blown away by it, but Lenovo’s press conference did me no favors there (I was glad to be invited, but Lenovo often tried to make the Sphere as boring as possible, somehow). Gwen Stefani’s concert during the Lenovo event at least showed off the more presentational tricks, and I admired the scale…but the funny thing is, scale collapses for me at some point. I could be looking at this on a pair of glasses. Couldn’t I? Sort of? Or is this about the community around me?

Interstellar Arc, by longtime VR pioneers Felix & Paul Studios, is a different type of immersive communion. All in headset (a Quest 3S), it’s a journey onboard a ship to an interstellar starship headed to a new planet. The hourlong experience involves wandering around this curved station and observing landmarks, discovering the history of the organization making this expedition. The headset was a little tight over my glasses and I wish there were more interactive elements mapped to the real space I wandered, but the illusion of walking a curved space station with its own gravity was uncanny. And I saw others exploring the space appear as avatars in the world with me. I could speak to them, if I used the communicator. I didn’t. But this meditative and mostly silent hour was my best remove from Vegas and CES…and I felt present with others. 

Meta’s trying to connect its neural band with smart cars, eventually, and I demoed how it could work at Garmin’s CES show floor exhibit. Smart cars are like models of an ambient interactive future we are still not fully at. Like an AR headset extended into a giant personal thing. There aren’t easy ways of connecting to these future environments, cars, spheres, things of our world. Is it via neural band? Smart glasses? Or just the phone we already have?

I’ll get into this more someday soon, but smart glasses (that I wore, and I demoed) at CES showed me a lot more needs to happen to make them cross the threshold to become everyday and essential. They’re so close, though. Sort of. Battery life getting better, displays becoming damn impressive, more ideas of wrist and ring and band interfaces. But. But. No one has solved what to do with AI as an interface concept. AI is being glommed in, at best, but I’ve seen no true vision of how AI could be an interface to understanding the world (or what’s on our phones). Just bits and pieces. And meanwhile, Google is lurking and ready to debut its smart glasses this year, while Meta is already updating its glasses feature by rolled-out feature. CES isn’t where this progress is happening: it’s just a way station. I wore Ray-Ban Gen 2 glasses and Even G2 glasses as I wandered around, and used Xreal 1S and Viture Beast glasses to project video from my Switch 2, phone and laptop. Display glasses are getting better and better, and the Gen 2 Ray-Bans survived a solid half-day plus before recharging. Even’s glasses have impressive size and battery life, but I wish their displays showed more notifications I need. And the ring-to-glasses pairing kept failing out on the show floor.

Oh, and once again, I brought magic tricks with me to Vegas. I find it helps reduce my stress, or becomes a thing I dig up every time I think of Vegas? I like little moments of immersive possibility. I try to keep the tricks low-key and mysterious enough to make reality seem to fray. I’m leaning into mentalism, now. And coins, and cards a bit. Back in 2020, I did a show for my CNET colleagues. I did little performances again, and while it’s stressful to face performance pressure, it’s also one of happiest things about my CES trips this year.

There’s so much more I did out there, but let’s leave that for next time.

Here’s what I wrote last week. It was a lot. More to come. And I’ll have more to pull out of my hat from this crowded trip next week on CNET, so keep reading and watching.

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