I walked around the site of CES 2023: where did the promised innovation go?
After two years of absence in 2021 and 2022, in 2023, Ai Faner finally returned to the CES scene in Las Vegas. Although the crowds of people before the new crown epidemic have reappeared in the exhibition hall, and the noise of music in the venue is still the same, what is missing is the most exciting part of CES in previous years-innovation.
In the booths of various manufacturers, the most conspicuous thing is not the super large screen, but the rows of VR eyes or AR tablets. If the year is removed, the same photo, saying that this is the 2019 CES show, probably no one will doubt whether the time is wrong.
In the booths of top mobile phone manufacturers, folding screen mobile phones have become bigger——but folding screens are nothing new; every car manufacturer is flaunting how strong their autonomous driving capabilities are, but autonomous driving was only a few years ago The mature technology of the car; the car machine of the new car maker has become more cool, can make video calls, and has a voice assistant-so what? Isn't this the smart home that was popular a few years ago?
AR/VR is naturally eye-catching, but dear readers, please don’t forget that ARKit or ARCore allows developers to make such demos in a few minutes, and the shoddy demos of these manufacturers are really real. It's just a nickel effect. Metaverse exhibition? With all due respect, this is no better than QQ pets. motion capture? Old wine from ten years ago, please don't take it out and put it in a new bottle.
When all companies are talking about AI, what they are actually talking about is nothing more than face recognition, emotion recognition, and natural language processing-all the progress of this is only due to the reduction of hardware prices.
When the RK3399 with a few dollars each has a good computing power, naturally such an application can be well implemented, but at best, this is just a micro-innovation.
When the so-called smart home is essentially just someone sticking an ESP32 on the off-the-shelf hardware to connect him to the Internet, and making an app so that he can be controlled remotely, this is just a sinking of technology, and even creating false needs—— After all, it is unnecessary to wait three to five seconds to turn off a light.
When everyone sends some insignificant sensor data back to the cloud with MQTT and calls it big data, an old saying in computer science comes true—garbage in, garbage out!
When I participated in the CES exhibition in 2017 or 2016, I still remember the tree made of flexible screens displayed by Royole Technology in the exhibition hall-the leaves of that tree were made of flexible screens, which was the first time Seeing large-scale commercial flexible screens, in the next few years, we will see the slowly popular folding screen mobile phones.
▲ After many years, I can no longer find the picture I took at that time. Source: Royole Technology
Probably when the first Samsung foldable phone was launched in 2018, it also looked full of technology. This reminds you all the time: the future is in front of you, and the future is full of hope.
What I could complain about back then was nothing more than Kodak's meaningless exhibition hall .
Of course, Kodak is here again this year, and the things on display are similar to those of the past.
Maybe the epidemic has caused a lot of anxiety in all walks of life, including practitioners in the technology industry; maybe it is home office that has caused communication obstruction and inefficiency; maybe the global supply chain crisis has caused innovative products to be unable to be delivered, maybe it is the global chip shortage As a result, ideas cannot be implemented – but is this an excuse for no innovation?
It’s interesting, but it’s not completely boring—since Aifaner became a sugar factory, other companies have followed this trend.
At Lotte’s booth in South Korea, after doing a test, you can get a small box of candy (wind oil essence, not delicious, don’t read it); the gift on Google’s booth is also a box of Android green candy (the taste is not good) How about it, don’t read).
It's funny to say that the most popular booth in the CES venue today is Hisense's "Future Kitchen" booth.
Why is it hot? Because it coincided with lunch time, Hisense hired several chefs to demonstrate the future kitchen for everyone.
The way of demonstration is naturally the most primitive human instinct: cooking. Specifically, several chefs demonstrated the use of Hisense's smart kitchen utensils to make hot dogs for everyone.
Of course, cooking and eating are things that contribute enormously to human development—after all, starving people don't innovate.
But is this the innovation we expect to see?
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