timeline16cesdayfour
Latest
A sweatshirt massage is better than no massage at all
I like massages. Who doesn't? But what if you could get a massage while you worked? Stood up or sat down anywhere. In your home, the office, or in the car? That's the premise of the AiraWear, a massage vest that embeds into (at the moment) a zip-up hoodie. I'm typing part of this article while my shoulders are being gently teased by two firm foam points, backed by air cushions that inflate and deflate. I just cranked the power to max and I'm feeling pretty good.
A virtual baseball simulator could change how hitters train
EON Sports VR is on a mission to change sports training as we know it. The young, Kansas City-based startup recently teamed up with retired MLB player Jason Giambi on Project OPS, a virtual reality baseball trainer powered by a consumer headset. But that's not the only novelty EON Sports VR has been working on. Last June, it teased an interactive baseball hitting simulator, one that allows players to step into a virtual batting cage and practice their swing. Today, at CES 2016, I had the chance to try it.
Glowforge is a laser cutter for DIY enthusiasts
The onslaught of 3D printers has created a booming market for machines that can make quality products at home. Glowforge is a new object-maker that's a 3D laser printer, cutter and engraver rolled into one. It will help DIY enthusiasts churn out a range of products with wood, acrylic, leather, fabric or even glass. The cutter uses a dual camera technology for realtime autofocus so it helps aligns the laser head with your pattern and makes the cutting process easy. The camera recognizes the material and even follows the beam of light, which is the width of a human hair, so it can adjust the timing and position every step of the way.
Hands-on with the crazy projects from Samsung's secret lab
Just like most major companies, Samsung now has a secret incubation lab of its very own, dubbed Creative Lab. Last week the company revealed it'd be showing off its first batch of projects here at CES, so we hustled over to check them out as soon as we could. Samsung had three concepts on the floor: Rink, a hand-motion controller for the Gear VR; Welt, a smart belt that tracks your waistline; and TipTalk, a strap that can be placed on any watch for smartwatch-esque features.
Meet KATIA, a robotic arm that wants to do it all
Some people very strongly believe that robots will eventually replace humans in the workforce. Those people probably wouldn't like KATIA, a surprisingly versatile robot arm we just met here at CES. Carbon Robotics founders Rosanna Myers and Dan Corkum managed to build an industrial-grade robotic arm that, ahem, won't cost you an arm or a leg. Seriously, they're aiming to sell KATIA for a relatively paltry $1,999 starting this March.
Kodak's Super 8 camera is retro in all the right ways
One of the nicer surprises at this year's CES was Kodak's Super 8 camera announcement. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the company isn't leaving the film development up to aspiring film makers. In the $50-$75 development cost, you can expect to get a film reel and a digital copy. Pretty neat. Being the curious folks that we are here at Engadget, I stopped by Kodak's booth for a closer look at the Super 8 prototypes.
Owlet's smart baby monitor can save lives while looking cute
Most startups crow about saving people time or money — Provo, Utah-based Owlet, on the other hand, is part of an exclusive club that wants to save lives. After a successful crowdfunding campaign and a beta testing push, Owlet recently released its washable, wearable baby monitor to the masses in hopes that its heart tracking abilities could help few the youngest of young ones succumb to ailments like SIDS.
The Engadget Challenge: Living vicariously through others
The most ridiculous spectacle to ever grace the Engadget stage at CES is over. But you can relive the magic of the Engadget Challenge right here. We spend much of our modern lives exploring the world through other people's social media accounts. You may have never been to the Grand Canyon, but your friend's Instagram feed makes it feel like you've seen it all anyway. While you can experience the places and things via social media, the question is can you be an active participant. Can you actually accomplish something through the eyes and hands of another? We seek to answer that very question in our first episode.
Razer's Nabu Watch is a tribute to the past
Don't call it a smartwatch, because as far as Razer is concerned, this is a digital chronograph that just happens to have smarts built-in. The Nabu Watch takes an old-timey digital watch from the late '90s — specifically a Casio G Shock and its kin — and bakes in the firm's Nabu fitness tracker tech. There's no pixel-dense display here, but three separate modules, the top two showing the date and time in glorious dot matrix. The lower third plays home to a 128 x 16 OLED screen that matches the one you'll find on the Nabu band itself. Thankfully, all of the same fitness, sleep tracking and social features from the original have made it across to this new variation.
Intel's RealSense camera made me the star of 'Fallout 4'
Over the holidays, I've really been putting the hours into Fallout 4. So when Intel and Uraniom said that it'd be demonstrating its RealSense 3D camera to embed people into that vault suit, I knew what I had to do. Uraniom's tech includes machine learning, geometry processing and 3D game engineering to ensure anyone that plants themselves into games (including GTA, FIFA and Skyrim) gets suitably freaked the heck out by the fluid, not-too-out-of-place results. After getting scanned by a HP tablet with RealSense cameras, the data was transferred to a work PC, where one of Uraniom's guys added trackers around my eyes and and mouth. (My fluffy Tintin hair isn't usually well-suited to 3D scanning, but the results this time are still uncanny.) Less than a minute later, I was looking slender and radiation-free in my vault suit and soon I was equipped with a jetpack powersuit and flying around a devastated Boston.
Nick Woodman talks Karma and the future of GoPro
GoPro head honcho Nick Woodman joined Engadget on stage at CES, and took the chance to tease more info about the much talked about quadcopter, Karma. Not much is known about how it will look, but Woodman explained that "We make everything backwards compatible, our goal is that your older GoPro will work with anything new we make, and vice versa." Near confirmation that Karma will work with its existing line of cameras, and won't have one built in.
Audio-Technica has a turntable for your wireless speakers
There's no doubting the vinyl resurgence, and this year's CES has a few turntable options for those hobbyists. In addition to Sony's new model that digitizes vinyl tunes and a Technics revival, Audio-Technica has a turntable for your wireless speaker setup. The company's AT-LP60-BT offers Bluetooth connectivity in a fully automatic belt-drive stereo turntable. This means that in addition to speakers, you can also pair the device with your wireless headphones (more on that in a second). You can connect up to eight different speakers as well, which would seem to make it a solid option for multi-room audio. However, we'd want to test the range before confirming you can use it in that manner.
This is the first object 3D-printed from alien metal
So-called "asteroid mining" company Planetary Resources is built on the belief that asteroids and other objects in space are loaded with resources that we can take advantage of, both here on Earth and as we begin to explore space in earnest. The essentially infinite supply of rocks floating through space, filled with valuable minerals that we'll eventually run out of on our home planet, sounds like a great resource to take advantage of. But the idea of mining, processing and building with alien metals also sounds like a massive and daunting undertaking.
Intel's RealSense phone with Project Tango up for pre-order
We heard back in August that Intel was creating a Project Tango developer kit, which also happened to be the first phone to include its RealSense 3D cameras. Now, it's available for pre-order for $399 on Intel's website. The RealSense Smartphone Developer Kit, as its officially called, packs in a 6-inch screen, Atom X7-Z8700 processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM. But its real unique feature is its array of 3D cameras, which can be used to detect objects, gestures and map space in three dimensions. There's no telling when Intel will start shipping out the dev kits, and right now it's only offering them in the United States.
Recon's HUD mask transfers your gaming skills to paintball
Recon Instruments and Empire Paintball's paintball mask is fun to wear — and I didn't even get to shoot anyone. The Empire EVS houses Recon's Snow2 heads-up display in bottom-right of the goggles, running on Android, with nine-axis sensors, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS, while the helmet itself looks like a color-saturated Darth Vader pretender -- and I mean that in the best possible way. Slipping into it is easy, and an armband control unit with directional buttons makes navigation through menus (as well as zooming in and out of maps) hard to screw up. The mask itself, coming from paintball equipment maker Empire has UVA/UVB radiation protection and doesn't fog up inside when the action picks up and your breathing gets heavy. The heads-up display (HUD) can also talk with action cams like the GoPro, which you can mount on your paintball gun to peek around corners and, as one Engadget editor calls it: "cheat".
The Fitbit Blaze doesn't feel nice enough to wear every day
The Fitbit Blaze is a new type of device for the company. It's the first hardware Fitbit has made that could be classified as a smartwatch, albeit one with a major focus on fitness rather than the more flexible and relatively feature-packed approach that characterizes Android Wear and the Apple Watch. But just as with other smartwatches, the Fitbit Blaze aspires to be something you'll want to wear on your wrist: Beyond the fluoroelastomer bands that resemble those found in other Fitbit devices, the company is also selling more-premium leather and metal straps. The question is whether the whole package is desirable enough to want to wear on your wrist every day.
David Pogue hates 3D TVs, but loves HDR and autonomous cars
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-344625{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-344625, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-344625{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-344625").style.display="none";}catch(e){}David Pogue is renowned for his musical talents, technological expertise and strong opinions. On the Engadget stage at CES 2016, he waxed poetic about the virtues of self-driving cars, told me why HDR is something we should all be excited about, and even explained his theory that 80 percent of everything "is crap." Like I said... the man is highly opinionated.
