It's Showtime
A postcard from Vegas, baby.
January sucks. For most people. But not for me.
One of the unusual things about spending the last 20 years on the road, on planes, and occasionally in moon buggies, is that while most people are dragging themselves out of their Christmas comas and back to rainy cold dark offices, my January begins by flying to Las Vegas.
At the start of every year the Consumer Electronics Show lands in Sin City. It’s a massive event that fills the Las Vegas Convention Centre, hotel ballrooms and private suites - halls and halls and rooms and rooms of sparkling new technology all vying for attention, and press events proclaiming with absolute certainty that this device right here is the next big thing. There’s even the occasional flying car zipping up the sidewalk next to the Strip.
CES is a good place to continue to forget about normality for a just a little bit longer after the Christmas break, and a great place to take the temperature of the industry.
Every few years the event is dominated by a genuinely big new thing, something that gets everyone talking, and changes the way we think about tech. VR, AR, drones, tablets, self-driving cars, all of these have, in their respective years, made the show feel renewed, exciting, and world-changing. That’s not to say that these technologies do end up taking over the world, but they certainly give everyone something new to show off.
However, this year was, I would say, mid-cycle. There were some interesting innovations, but nothing ground-breaking. More of what we saw last year, but with enough oddities to make a very fun TV programme.
It’s strange, really, because I was actually expecting to see much more mention of Artificial Intelligence. Given how much it’s dominated the headlines over the last year, I was surprised not to see “AI in everything”. But from my tour of the show floor it looked like the manufacturers were being remarkably restrained in their marketing. That being said, my colleague James Clayton had an encounter with an AI pillow that suggested otherwise, so maybe I just got lucky with the path I ploughed across the halls.
Screenwashing
There are thousands of stalls at CES, so it’s important to stand out. Once upon a time, the easiest way to do that was by filling your stand with giant walls of TVs. The show would strobe with huge screens showing off the latest display tech - flexible OLEDs, Quantum dot LCDs, LED LCDs, 130 inch plasmas, whatever it was, it made for stunning eye-candy, and looked great on camera.
Manufacturers are still striving for the biggest, brightest, sharpest, thinnest display, but these days TVs don’t dominate quite as much as they used to. I’m not sure if that’s because screen technology has become commoditised, with no discernable difference from one to the next, or whether there’s now just more cool stuff you can catch people’s attention with.
These days the battle for the best picture quality continues at the microscopic scale. There are two or three competing technologies, all trying to produce the best images, and all coming at it from different directions. Here’s a really good explainer on the differences and similarities between LCD, OLED and LED, their drawbacks, and the technology that manufacturers are putting on top of each to zero in on the perfect picture.
LG and Samsung are the big names in screens, and they still managed to grab headlines this year - by turning transparent. Their see-through displays were definitely eye-catching, although I’m not so sure they’re that practical. The main problem with transparent screens is, well, that you can see through them. Any pixel that is not lit up becomes transparent. And the lack of black combined with the lack of back means that if you actually want to watch some normal content (instead of the super-impressive images of ice, trees, and glass cubes), your 1970s flock wallpaper might end up poking through the night scenes.
This is the reason the LG screens had a black curtain that could descend behind each one, which, you know, kinda invalidates the whole idea in my eyes.
To be fair, this technology would look great in the marketing space. Shop windows, normal windows - any transparent surface could in theory become a display.
I came across some other see-through display tech too - a roll-out clear plastic film that would “catch” a projected image in a way that normal glass wouldn’t.
Here’s another way to do transparent displays.
And I have to give an honourable mention to the Looking Glass, which I first saw a couple of years ago. This is a 3D display which, unusually, doesn’t require special glasses. It has a lenticular screen which shows different versions of the same image to each eye, and, if done right, really does give the sense of stereoscopic vision.
For me, the most memorable screen I’ve experienced, many years ago, was a Minority Report style display that very literally floated in the air.
The idea didn’t seem to take off, and it had obvious drawbacks, but it still sticks in my mind as just being, well, completely out there.
Surviving trade-shows
CES is a stimulating experience, but don’t get me wrong - it, and its host city, are an assault on the senses. Go to Vegas once, and never again, that’s my mantra.
The architecture is ridiculous (although it is home to one of my favourite buildings in the world - the Luxor pyramid (here’s my three-part Twitter tour), the food is mainly sugar, everything glows and flashes, even the air is hostile - it’s so dry that my lips start falling apart by day four, and I get static electric shocks from every piece of metal I touch.
In fact it’s got to the point where, as I trudge my way from the taxi drop off point all the way through the casino to my hotel room, I’ll nervously tap every fruit machine and door handle on the way, to continually discharge myself. No, I’m not some superstitious gambler trying to feel his way to a fortune - I just don’t want to get a massive spark when I press the lift button.
I posted some Vegas survival tips on the socials - they included good walking shoes, lip oil (less ganky than balm, which is important when you’re on camera), and buying your own breakfast cereal from a grocery store. The latter I joyously ate from a plastic cup in my room with my emergency spoon (what, you don’t have emergency cutlery in your bag? Amateur.).
Living room
I have two other top tips for surviving CES, that may also be transferable to other trade shows, but they only really work if you’re visiting under certain conditions.
Firstly, if there’s enough of you, and you get on well enough, rent a house instead of several hotel rooms. Moneywise it can work out about the same, and if you go for 5 or more bedrooms, you can end up with a fairly luxurious place. I’ve stayed in houses with pillars before. In my bedroom, for goodness sake.
Most houses are within a 20 or 30 minute drive of the Strip, meaning you can return to a little sanctuary of calm at the end of your day, with no neon, lots of space, daylight, and the facility to cook your own dinner from fresh ingredients bought from a supermarket. Your waistline will thank you, I promise.
But, as I say, you do need to be sure you’ll get on with your housemates - it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and previously some of my team have rightly drawn a line between work and time off, and opted to stay in a hotel, so they didn’t feel forced to hang out with their boss in the evenings. Or share a bathroom with me.
My second tip is, in a way, even more niche - get the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible. Hit CES hard, get stuff done, and then get out. This only really makes sense if you have somewhere else in the US to go to - either home, if you live there, or, like us for example, other shoots in other cities that are a cheap, short hop after that expensive long haul flight.
In the past, we’ve flown to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, a space balloon workshop in Arizona and a rocket factory in Texas. This year I got to complete my NASA triple, by filming at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Having already made programmes at JPL in Pasadena and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, I felt like I’d completed the set, describing a horizontal line across the bottom of the US. Then I was reminded that there are at least ten main NASA locations. Still a way to go then.
I’m still editing the NASA programme as I write this, and I think it’s going to be a good’un. It was dusty - that’s all I’ll say for the time being.
The annual January trip to the US always leaves me with mixed feelings - it’s revitalising and exhausting, exciting and repetitive. But I think I’ll miss it when it’s gone from my life.
Oh, and regarding jet lag - people laugh when I talk about the 3 o’clock wee. But it is a thing, isn’t it?
Great write up and some good memories at my many years attending CES :)