CES 2018 Dragonfly Media visits the main
Keeping up with digital trends, modern marketing and state of the art technology is something we pride ourselves on. The International CES trade show is a great way to do that while giving us an excuse to have some fun as well!
Sleek marketing is definitely still the trend in 2018 with many of the most innovative companies opting for abbreviated or altered wording and clean vector logos. We started our day out with a bang with the new real-life pong table game from Atari. Super fun and of course our technical director Edward dominated challengers.
Robotics was a big deal this year. The technology is still developing as far as the fluidity of motion but the overall aesthetics and form factors were massively improved over last year. Many of the robotics looks like they came right out of a movie or an anime. We sat down with one fairly large robot that played Scrabble. Moving squares on a grid and having an immense knowledge of spelling is perfect for a robot so needless to say it was the best Scrabble player ever. In times past, a development robot like that would have consisted of just an arm but in 2018 the rest of the unit was much more humanoid. Very neat.
VR was big as well but it was much more available this year. A lot of booths were sporting HTC Vive and Oculus headsets. In particular, the Stern pinball company who is responsible for pretty much all of the amazing pinball machines in existence today, were demoing their new VR compatible software with an Oculus Rift headset. The concept was great and it played great as well. Available to play are various Stern pinball games set in a virtual room. Pinball isn’t something you would immediately associate with being a great candidate for VR, but it worked surprisingly well. It was every bit as cool as just about any of the VR demos there.
Eye motion tracking was making its way into a variety of tech which we tried out with varying results. One of the Razer laptops had it built in and when you tilted your head/moved your eyes you got a little bit of an effect of looking around in game. It was subtle but you also had to be pretty dead on center for it to function. Amber took a try at controlling a remote-control car with retinal controls.
Drone tech is getting better and better as well. Portability is the big thing in sub $1000 drones. The $150 portable offering from Wingsland was impressive. Long flight time and foldable.