CES Asia may not be quite as overwhelming as its Las Vegas counterpart, but it’s still pretty crazy. There’s the same spectacle, the same gadgets, the same self-driving cars, the same drones — all the same technology, just catering to an Asian market. In this video, we’ll take a little VR tour, showing off some of the big trends.
You can’t have a consumer electronics show without cars, which have become a big source of technology in recent years, and a major part of every tech show. CES Asia featured a number of fascinating innovations, from Pioneer’s LIDAR display to self-driving cars, but BMW’s impressive new i8 goes beyond all of that. Engineers asked: Once this is a self-driving car platform, what else are we going to do? What is that experience like for drivers? What is it like if you’re the guy that owns a self-driving car?” To that end, the i8 supports car-sharing services, and even connects with your home. Imagine this: the smart car knows when you’re getting home, and it turns on the heating system for you, turns on all the lights, and all of a sudden your house is ready to go. Smart car, smartphone, smart home … pretty smart world, huh?
CES Asia also showed off all sorts of drones: Little drones, big drones, toy drones, drones for business, drones for agriculture. I haven’t seen a product category explode like this since … well … since ever. You can’t throw a tennis ball without hitting a drone here.
One seemingly normal drone here is hiding a new technology. Well, its an old technology, but it’s the first time we’ve seen it in a drone. It’s an Intel RealSense camera, which lets this drone follow you. A lot of drones do follow mode, but this one will dodge obstacles. So it will go around trees, it will go around hedges — whatever it is — in order to follow you without colliding with anything else.
In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.
So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.