The Best Moments Of CES 2024 Day 4: Sonic Screens And Mars Batteries
It's the final day of CES, and thankfully, all of our writers have survived — mostly. After a week of ambitious scheduling, around 16,000 Slack messages, and driving our fitness trackers mad, we've finally seen all we're going to see at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Overall, this was a great show with a strong focus on computing and automotive technologies. AI, as it turned out, was more than just a buzzword. We'll be sorting through everything we saw over the next few days with more roundups and features about the cool tech that was on the floor.
In the meantime, we wanted to whet your appetites with one final entry in our (mostly) day-by-day wrapup of the technology that impressed us at the show. If you missed our previous entries, we told you what tech we brought to the show, then we took in some gaming hardware and booming sound, saw electric shoes and smart telescopes, and previewed some air gesture tech that could change how we control our phones and computers. To cap it all off, here's what we found on our last day.
Sound from your screen
No trip to CES is complete without stepping through the booth of a TV maker. Wandering around looking at gigantic TVs you'd have to build a house around is always a trip, and MiniLED panels and projectors as far as the eye can see always give you a sense as to not only how far the technological limits can be pushed, but just how few large blank areas of wall you actually have in your own home. In short, this is a very good opportunity to live vicariously for a few minutes in front of some of the largest and most glorious moving picture boxes you'll see. Of course, sometimes there's more — here's what Hisense brought.
In one of its more impressive demos, Hisense brought what it's calling the "First 8K Sonic Screen Laser TV in the World." Now, there are a lot of caveats in that statement –"8K," "Sonic Screen," and "Laser" — but it's the middle one that's the most notable. Hisense has been known for selling "TVs" that are actually ultra-short-throw projectors with screens designed for optimal optical performance. That's what this is, but Hisense goes a step further.
Here, the screen doubles as a speaker handling the high and mid-range audio, with a separate subwoofer handling the bass. That, in and of itself, is cool, but this screen almost creates a sort of sound bubble that helps drown out the sounds of the show floor around us and gives listeners an almost spatial audio experience. When a leaf fell from the tree and crinkled a little bit, you heard it coming from the left side of the screen. It was quite the experience.
Projector on a gimball
Keeping on the projector train, XGIMI had a neat follow-up to its Horizon Ultra projector, the Horizon Max. This projector is a long-throw projector that adds IMAX-Enhanced certification and is mounted on a gimbal, which is actually a lot more handy than you might think.
Setting up a projector can be something of a chore, as getting the projector to shine in just the right area at just the right angle is not always easy. XGIMI has always had excellent automatic keystone correction and obstacle avoidance, but the gimbal allows the projector to scan the walls in the room and find the best place to cast its screen. Plus, if you want to move the projector, you don't have to disconnect it and move it around.
This is a quality-of-life addition that anyone who has ever set up a projector can certainly relate to — but it's also a cost-prohibitive addition for all but the most expensive projectors.
Jackery targets space, sort of
While walking through the North Hall, you might think you've spotted the Mars Opportunity rover. However, as that's about 140 million miles away, what you're instead seeing is a four-wheeled solar generator that is heavily inspired by the legendary exploratory vehicle. Jackery calls it a "PV-ESS charging integrated intelligent service robot" and explains it has a light tracking system to keep it charged.
Sadly, no well-known billionaires have offered to put Jackery's Mars rover-based solar generator on a rocket. Jackory does seem to be planning on going ahead with it, with the intention of selling it to businesses or governments. As things stand, it isn't 100% certain who will buy into the "Solar Generator Mars Bot," what it will be used for, or even what its specs are.
However, we know that it is capped with an Automatic Sunflower Solar Tracker system, which contains some of Jackery's high-efficiency photoelectric conversion rate panels — which should make it easier to keep that battery on wheels topped up.
Walking the dog
You get the occasional dog at CES. Some are service dogs, others are there to sniff for threats, and there are a few that are made up of nuts and bolts instead of flesh and bone. We saw one of the latter strolling into the North Hall while we were moving from booth to booth. It isn't exactly unique these days, and it may conjure dark images in the minds of people who have seen that one "Black Mirror" episode, but seeing it dance around on the spot, walk backward, walk forwards, and act as a bench for one of its handlers was still pretty impressive.
We're referring to the Deep Robotics X30, which is the latest release from a company that calls itself a global leader in quadroped robotics. Outside of a convention hall, it's capable of moving through extreme weather and challenging terrain. It can even navigate a staircase, which is something those robots from the future in "Doctor Who" were thwarted by for many years.