Giant televisions and impressive cameras are great and everything, but it’s not why your intrepid CES Awesome correspondents got into the tech journalism game. No, we were lured away from all those other, sensible career paths by an obsession with the intersection of science and gadgetry. We like pretending we live in a science fiction movie, and nowhere on the planet provides as many opportunities for that feeling as CES. Here are a few of the things that blew our minds while also harnessing our brainwaves to move cursors across screens.
Check out more top picks from CES 2013.
The proliferation of gaming devices and platforms is great, but it inadvertently distracts from the original mission of games in the first place: bring people together to have fun with each other. Sifteo Cubes bring the interactivity back by allowing multiple people to play together on a modular gaming system – all while taking up very little physical space or gobbling up your hard drive. They’re also great for kids to hone their logic and puzzle skills.
Continue here for more on Sifteo Cubes.
One of the best and worst parts of CES is that there’s too much to see. Between the various conference halls, keynotes, ballrooms, and show floors, the event is bursting at the seams with all the new electronics and gadgets that we’ll see in the near future (and some we won’t).
Enter, Displair. Hidden in the depths of the Venetian, it’s a touch display made of nothing but mist — and guess what, it’s not just a concept! The Russian startup plans to bring the Displair to market later this year for the incredibly affordable price of $12,000. Too steep? You’re in luck: You can rent it for $1,000 a day.
We know, for that price, if you’re considering the Displair you’re probably a prince living in Dubai. WIth your own island. With five islands. And a pet tiger. Anyway, the point is, you can play Fruit Ninja on mist-made touch display and nothing else matters.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.