My CES 2024 Experience
I was fortunate enough to attend CES 2024 in Las Vegas with the startup I work at, Valkyrie Industries. We were based at Eureka Park, in the convention center of the Venetian Hotel. We had a booth where people could stop by and have a demonstration of our product and a chat in general about what we and they do.
What is CES?
CES, (Consumer Electronics Show), is a global hardware and technology showcase held annually in Las Vegas. Considered one of the most influential tech events in the world, CES serves as a pivotal platform for companies, from industry giants to startups, to showcase their latest inventions and technological breakthroughs. The event spans a range of sectors, including, consumer electronics, healthcare, automotive, and smart home technologies. CES is a trade show but also serves for networking opportunities connecting people globally. The event offers a glimpse into the future, highlighting trends and technologies that companies of different sizes believe will shape our world in the years to come.
My Experience as an Exhibitor
Demonstrating a product throughout the day means you can explain it and answer questions on it in incredible detail in your sleep by the end of the week. Constant repetition of the product description makes you literate in how your product works and what it aims to achieve.
People’s questions overtime can be repetitive, and you find yourself iterating your answers so that they become optimised for resolving what they may not understand.
The atmosphere where we were based was fantastic, we had a booth next to Double Point, a startup that makes software for android smartwatches which tracks the movement and actions of your hand to control consumer technology like iPads or even lamps. It was great spending time between demos supporting each other, trying each others’ technology out and chatting about product development with them.
I used a Samsung Galaxy watch to control lamps at Double Point’s booth.
A big highlight for me was showing super serious people from big companies our product and seeing their reactions. I remember a really serious man wanting to have a demo from us, and when I took him through our gun demo, where he shot some guns in a target range and felt recoil from the haptic devices, he underwent a “Ratatouille” moment where he appeared to be transported back to childhood video game excitement and seemed to love every minute of the experience. It must be noted that the software and UI members of our tech team deserve huge credit for reactions like this, it was all down to great design from them.
I was also really happy to meet Armenians at the event, who have companies based in Armenia. I met people from Nairi-Tech and The Crowdfunding Formula - I’m sure there were others I did not have the chance of meeting, but seeing their presence at a global technology event was brilliant. I hope that in the future Armenia can have a national pavilion much like other countries did to showcase the nation's presence in global tech innovation and development.
LVCC
I spent half a day at the LVCC (Las Vegas Convention Center) where I was able to see large companies show their new products. Personal highlights for me included Canon’s sports technology, where they leverage their camera technology in sports games, to let people jump into real games in both VR and AR settings, using rendered videos of NBA games. This was a surreal experience and if it existed for football, would be insanely popular in the UK.
The people wearing PICO headsets were able to see a render of an NBA game play out on the table.
Interestingly, I went to Sony’s booth, and was able to see that Hawkeye has similar technology for football and tennis. There were no VR or AR experiences for football, but seeing some footage of video processing for game analysis, offside decisions and player positioning was very insightful.
Although I did not see this in person, I have to say that a technology I am particularly excited for is the Rabbit R1 which was announced at CES. Learning about the LAM (large action model) technology and how it differs in execution to LLMs (large language models) was pretty cool, and as a lover of retro technology I loved the design, which was done in partnership with Teenage Engineering! It’s a very interesting time to be working in hardware and tech, and seeing products like Rabbit R1, and the Humane AI Pin, the latter announced in November 2023, challenging the role of the smartphone is very cool.
In Review
In conclusion CES was a brilliant experience, being in an environment where people share their work and projects from around the world was a lot of fun more than anything The experience of representing technology that I am involved in creating was really helpful for my personal and professional development. For anyone in the field, or anyone who just finds of electronics and technology interesting, I recommend the experience of going if the opportunity arises.