Day Two of
CES I spent trying to walk the exhibit halls. I started more than an hour
before CES officially opened sneaking in with the delegation of Samsung around
8:40am and left when the exhibit hall closed at 6pm. And I still have not
visited all of the exhibits. CES is enormous!
Now, to our
main questions: how all this technology is changing our lives and will change
the lives of our students? And how should we change our teaching to prepare our
students to be successful in their future? The answer – I did not really see any revolutionary technology that would change the world.
It seemed to
me (and I remind you that I have not visited all the exhibit halls yet) that
most of the stuff was about TV or video in general. They had super huge HD TVs
– I think 110’ LED TV was the biggest I saw. Next to them there were Ultra HD
TVs with 4K resolution (which is 3840 X 2160 instead of traditional 1920 X 1080). In the next hall, yet another company already had Super
Ultra HD TVs with 8K resolution.
Yet, in the next hall there were 3D TVs that
used super cool and comfortable glasses; then 3D TVs that you could look
through a screen instead of wearing any glasses, than 3D TVs that did not need
any glasses or screens. Plus, of course, the combinations – 3D TVs with 4K Ultra
HD resolution and so on.
Needless to
say, they were all network integrated and many of them touchscreen. As for touchscreens, Windows 8 seemed to dominate everything. Not iOS or Android, Windows was on phones, tablets, computers and TVs.
They also
had projectors that can project down on the same wall; or projectors that can
project even in bright sunlight, but to me it is all the same video technology.
The best video technology that maybe is getting pretty close to the
revolutionary mark was Displair where you see 3D image, similar to a hologram,
in thin air in front of you and it is controlled by your touch (http://displair.com). It is better to see it
live, but even looking at the pictures you can see how cool it is. I am maybe
biased, however, since these guys are from Russia J
And for the
gamers there is finally a good alternative to Kinect – you can now play
first-person shooters controlling the game with your body and with the gun in
hand. That was amazing and gave me quite a work-out after just five or so
minutes playing.
Of course,
there was plenty of other stuff: phones, tablets, computers, cars, cameras, security gadgets, robots (this was also pretty cool, but how
many years do we talk about robots already), printers, including 3D printers
(and again they have been around for some time). I need, however, to say thanks
to a 3D printer company, 3D Systems for the excellent gator head they printed for me (Go
Gators!).
What
pleasantly surprised me was the amount of technology related to health and
fitness – I did not expect that. And I could not expect the amount of massage
chairs, foot massagers and all other kinds of massagers represented at CES – I would’ve never in my mind connected CES with a massage chair!
Anyway, at
the end of the day there were plenty of receptions available. I had a difficult
choice between IAWTV awards or CES International reception. I picked
International. Most of the people I chatted with there were from China and most of
them were exhibitors. So, China does produce a lot of technology. I also met people from other Asian countries, South America, Africa, but I did not run
into anybody from Europe at all L
Time to get ready
for Day Three tomorrow!
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