While CES doesn’t technically kick off until Tuesday, the conference gets a bit of a soft launch with CES Unveiled. This event hosts a ton of companies, all proudly showing off their latest products and concepts in one giant room. While there’s plenty to write home about, five products in particular this year caught my eye:
Tombot
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Tombot’s robotic puppy, “Jennie,” isn’t supposed to be a pet-replacement. Instead, Jennie is specifically designed to help people with Alzheimer’s. The bot is a healthcare device, and is made to not only comfort owners, but to monitor “sundowning,” or the confusion that some living with Alzheimer experience in late afternoon and at night.
I can’t speak to the medical claims, but Tombot impressed me. I’ve seen products like this before, but what struck me was the realism. That’s not to say Tombot’s robot tricks you into thinking there’s a real puppy on the table. But the company has designed the bot with enough motors and sensors to make it realistic enough. When you look at Jennie, she looks at you; when you move, her face reacts in kind, powered by cleverly-placed motors. There are capacitive touch sensors to react to touch, light sensors to adjust to the lighting of the room, gyros for orientation, and microphones to responds to sounds.
Jennie is designed to be interactive: You can call its name—either Jennie, or a name you set in the app—and it responds to the call, potentially with a bark. Tombot says that it hired a number of ten-week-old lab puppies to record the voices for its bot. In all, Jennie will have about 1,500 unique behaviors when Tombot launches her this year.
Tombot told me that Jennie is designed to last all day on a single charge. When you aren’t home, Jennie can drop into a sort of low power mode, that should last over a week. When you come back, Jennie should immediately welcome you home. Tombot says its bot will cost $1,500 at launch, but will offer financing options.
CubicScreen
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt/Lifehacker
What if you could turn your iPhone into a 3DS? That’s what I took away from the premise of CubicSpace’s CubicScreen, anyway. The company makes a screen protector for your iPhone embedded with an optical filter that allows you to view spatial photos and videos in 3D, without the need for glasses or a separate device. It’s your 2D iPhone, in 3D.
I was a bit skeptical walking past the booth, but, in practice, the tech really works. CubicSpace had some 3D photos and videos already stored in the CubicScreen app on their demo iPhones, and, when looking at the screen, they really did appear three dimensional. This isn’t “pop out of your screen” 3D, mind you; rather, it’s an depth effect. If you’ve ever used the 3D feature on a 3DS, this is that experience: You’ll be able to see the depth behind subjects in your photos and videos, which adds to the immersion of the image.
Part of the effect uses eye tracking to adjust the effect as you view the image. To that point, the app can support zooming while retaining the 3D effect. It’s a little trippy: You zoom in on an picture, and, most of the time, it snaps into 3D instantly. Sometimes, the effect falls out, and you can tell you’re looking at a distorted image. But most of my experience, the effect held.
This 3D effect wasn’t just a trick of editing, either: CubicSpace took a photo of Lifehacker’s Associate Tech Editor, Michelle Ehrhardt at the booth, which instantly took on the 3D effect. The screen overlay and the software appears to work fast.
CubicScreen will cost $79 when it launches. There is currently an order page, but they aren’t accepting payment yet.
Allergen Alert
Credit: Jake Peterson/Lifehacker
If you have a food allergy, you know the stress that comes when you’re not in control of your meals. There’s a risk to eating food you didn’t make yourself, and for some of us, that risk isn’t an option.
That’s why I found Allergen Alert’s “the mini lab” so intriguing. The idea is, when you want to know whether your food contains a certain allergen, you can scoop a sample of it into the provided container, place that container into the mini lab, and within two minutes, you’ll have a positive or negative result. The device itself isn’t large—about the size of a portable speaker—which makes it feasible to take out to restaurants and other people’s houses.
Right now, the company says the mini lab can detect milk and gluten, up to five parts per million, but the goal is to detect other major allergens, like egg, fish, soy, sesame, peanuts shellfish, tree nuts. Of course, I have no way to actually test whether it can detect milk and gluten at this time, so I can’t necessarily endorse the product. In fact, it isn’t currently available: Allergen Alert tells me the product is supposed to launch in September for $200.
What do you think so far?
However, if Allergen Alert is correct in its claims, this product could be a game changer. A two minute check on that supposedly allergen-free meal could literally save someone’s life, and offer peace of mind to those who could have serious adverse effects from ingesting an allergen.
Birdfy Hum Bloom
Credit: Jake Peterson/Lifehacker
Birdfy brings a new smart bird feeder concept to CES just about every year. And while the company had its previous models on display at Unveiled this year, its newest prototype grabbed my attention.
The Hum Bloom is not meant for all of the birds that visit your house or garden. Instead, this product is specifically designed for hummingbirds. The Hum Bloom has an 4K camera that can shoot up to 120fps slow-motion video. While that’d make for some dramatic landings for any bird, it’s particularly ideal for capturing hummingbirds that flap their wings hundreds or thousands of times per minute.
Birdfy says the Hum Bloom’s AI can identify more than 150 hummingbird species, so you’ll know which type of bird you’re watching in slo-mo on your phone. Birdfy claims the feeder is “leak-proof,” and also comes with ant moat to keep out bugs. Personally, I’m stuck on Birdfy designing a slo-mo camera system just for hummingbirds. I look forward to seeing that footage from reviewers in the future.
Opsodis 3D speaker
Credit: Jake Peterson/Lifehacker
This is one of those products my picture will simply not do justice. In order to understand why I was so taken by this speaker, you’d need to hear it for yourself.
Admittedly, I wasn’t expecting much when I agreed to demo the speaker. Again, at first glance, the Opsodis just looks like your typical wireless speaker. That changed once the rep played a video on a connected iPad: Suddenly, I was hearing sounds next to my ears; behind my ears; around my ears. I wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening on screen, because I was too distracted wondering how I was hearing everything I was hearing from a relatively tiny speaker directly in front of me.
As it turns out, this wouldn’t work if I had the speaker placed just about anywhere. The demo used Opsodis’ “narrow mode,” one of three audio modes the speaker is capable of. Narrow mode is the stronger spatial audio experience, but requires the speaker to be placed close and directly in front of the user: specifically, 60 centimeters away, or 23.62 inches. “Wide mode,” which I didn’t try, offers a “softer” spatial audio experience, while the third mode simulates standard stereo audio.
While this won’t necessarily offer a movie theater-like experience just by placing it in front of your TV, this was some of the most fun I had at CES Unveiled tonight.
