CES 2015: Part Two

While 3D printing was the primary reason I went to CES 2015, there were plenty of other things I wanted to see and do while in Las Vegas.

One of the first CES related events I attended was a rooftop party hosted by Samsung Canada. They had an outdoor ice rink in the Cosmopolitan Hotel’s upper pool area decked out with their newly launched UHDTV’s showing the World Junior Hockey gold medal final game. They also had Wendell Clark on hand to play a little hockey and take a lot of selfies with the attendees. Even the food was Canadian themed with lots of poutine for everyone.

I also got to try out the Samsung Gear VR unit which was pretty cool. Keeping with the Canadian theme of the night, the virtual reality footage on the Gear was from Tourism BC and it was pretty amazing.

After the skating party, I headed up with some friends to the now infamous Yo suite on the 61st floor and took in the strip from the stunning balcony.

I stayed at an AirBnB that was only a few minutes away from the famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, featured on the History Channel show, Pawn Stars so I had to stop by.

Unfortunately they weren’t filming when I was there so I didn’t get to see any of the regulars from the show.

Next up was a meetup with the people behind a Kickstarter I backed a while ago, Lima, that are just about ready to ship. It’s basically a little device that you plug into your router at home and then plug in a storage device. It then becomes your own cloud based storage for all your devices – think Dropbox but it’s 100% your own and you can upgrade it by plugging in a bigger external hard drive. They have been hosting meetups with backers in a number of cities and since they were attending CES it was a great opportunity to see the production model.

Now I really can’t wait to get my Lima after seeing it in person. I’m told it’s going to ship very soon!

Back on the show floor, there was an overwhelming amount of things to see. In two days of walking around the halls, I logged over 50,000 steps and still only feel like I saw about 25% of CES.

There were a ton of wearables, fitness trackers and IoT gadgets. I stopped by the Epson booth to see their Moverio smart glasses.

One interesting application of their glasses is for piloting quadcopters where you can still see your surroundings but also get a heads up view of what the drone sees, along with all kinds of flight stats. They worked quite well and even worked on top of regular glasses.

Speaking of drones and quadcopters, there was an entire area dedicated to ‘unmanned systems’ and DJI showed off their recently launched Inspire 1 system:

In case you can’t find any friends to play beer pong, there is a robot that can play with you:

There seemed to be a lot of these Segway-like wheeled machines everywhere:

The GrillBot was something silly I found but that it was kinda cool:

turns out they’ve been for sale for a while now and it was even listed in the Skymall catalog on my flight home.

Lowes was using Occulus Rift’s in their Holoroom to show you what that kitchen remodel would look like:

Forget 4K, Samsung has an SUHD 8K tv that is 110″ and it has glassless 3D too. A photo doesn’t do it justice:

Sharp had this wraparound LCD screen that you’d swear was an aquarium:

Rocket skates are a thing:

I’m still trying to get the use case for these telepresence robots that were also everywhere on the show floor:

This was just creepy:

Nikon had an amazing booth with a cool 360 camera rig setup with a 45 minute line to use:

This guy really took advantage of the bullet time:

This is the levitating bluetooth speaker that everyone was raving about:

This display wall was kinda cool to see up close and was a bit mezmerizing to watch it flip the ‘pixels’ around:

It was interesting to see the CES social media command center in real time:

That pretty much wraps up CES 2015 for me…maybe next year I’ll get to see 50% of the show.

I’ll leave you with the COOKI…a robot that cooks for you (while you sleep in the background):

See a ton more photos from CES 2015 on my Flickr.

Special thanks to Roam Mobility for keeping me online while travelling to Las Vegas.