What’s changed from CES 2015 to CES 2016

Leslie Barry

19 Jan 2016 — 3 min read

Another CES is over for the year.

I’ve just done as much of CES2016 as possible in Las Vegas this year and it’s been interesting to see what has changed, what has evolved and what is new this year.

CES 2015 was the convergence of tech such as Nvidia and Creative and Intel moving into cars. Intel aggressively expanding into multiple domains. Robots doing very simple tasks. Basic drones and hundreds of wearables, pre-Apple Watch. VR was basically only Occulus and the Tesla Model X was previewed.

By CES 2016, cars are rapidly becoming digital platforms and data centres. Lidar is affordable and commonplace, bringing the autonomous vehicle that much closer.

Intel is even more impressive and is dominating context aware ‘seeing’ drones with RealSense, experimenting with real-time 360 degree VR streaming and more.

Robots are more functional

and there are as many drone variants as there were wearables last year. Fitbit is dominating wearables but there are way too many point solution wearables to be useful to the already confused consumer.

VR is exploding with any version of a VR headset you could imagine, with whole businesses created by Google Cardboard variants. 360 video recorders are very real and usable and I expect they will be compressed into your next mobile device 2 to 3 years, if it even takes that long.

Smart Home is now a thing this year. Not sure how useful some of the ideas are, and it often seems like manufacturers are doing things just because they can — who really needs a curved TV or dry-cleaning cupboard that takes longer to load than drop it off? The good thing is that finally someone is trying to solve the hateful ironing problem.

Best of the show for me was the dominance and bravery of Intel stepping into new markets at speed and scale. Also a mention to the Furo-D robot which was captivating and functional.

Many, many technologies I saw probably shouldn’t exist and seem to be waste of the amazing brains creating them, but maybe they serve as the pre-cursor to something valuable.

The most experimental tech I saw was the personal quad copter, but no way would I get in it or use one — yet.

Boring:

TV’s are getting bigger, curvier and still just tv’s.
Smart Phone covers. really?

Very early:

Quantified self — massively fragmented and still useless / un-actionable data. This needs to become actionable information to be useful and holistic.
Smart home — what’s the compelling use case here? Feels a lot like wearables. I attended a panel discussion hosted by CNet, which included leaders from Amazon, Intel, Nest, Samsung, and Big Ass Solutions and they couldn’t agree with what the smart home is and why it’s useful. I agree with them.
IoT — we’re in year zero here, but coming fast.

Biggest surprises :

How fast VR its growing since Facebook got involved,
Drone automation and rapid progress,
How limited wearables are as an ecosystem because “mostly healthy people are using wearables”, and
how Fitbit is dominating.

Themes for 2016:

Autonomous Vehicles converging with electric vehicles
Drones,
Robots
VR enabled by mass-market creation of 360 video
Netflix is now a global entertainment provider. Awesome company pushing change hard.