CeBIT 2015 kicks off in Germany in March and one of the cool things that will be on display at the show this year is called RoboChop. RoboChop is an industrial robot arm that is controlled via a web app. The arm has a supply of yellow polystyrene blocks that people can carve using the arm from the web. There will be four different RoboChop arms at the show carving out yellow blocks.
The company known as Organic Transit has made an effort this year to show off a vehicle known as ELF, letting it be seen for the first time at the international technology trade fair known as CeBIT. This machine is made to fill a previously un-touched niche between car and bicycle, made to work with users hoping to make their short commutes as easy as possible.
If you thought Intel's plans for a viewer-watching Web TV box were intrusive, you might want to bury your face in your hands (and leave it there permanently) after seeing Fraunhofer's clever and creepy SHORE facial ID system. On show at CeBIT, SHORE can not only identify a face in a still image or real-time video stream, but figure out gender, age, and even what mood the person is in: happy, surprised, angry, or sad. Meanwhile, while Intel's home entertainment tracking system is already mired in controversy, Fraunhofer tells us commercial implementations of SHORE are already out in the wild.
Gagging for Glass but can't afford Google's $1,500 Explorer Edition? GlassUp thinks it may have the answer, a wearable display that looks almost like a regular set of glasses, and harnesses the power of your existing smartphone to flash real-time information into your eyeline. On show in prototype form at CeBIT, and set to ship later in the year, GlassUp takes a more humble approach to wearables than Google does with Glass, making its headset a companion display rather than a standalone computer.
Angry Birds on an 84-inch 4K tablet? Not quite, but if your iPad or Nexus 10 simply isn't big enough or high-res enough, MyMultitouch has an 84-inch beast to offer instead. The Germany company is showing off its biggest multitouch table/display to-date at CeBIT, a vast 3.840 x 2,160 Ultra HD screen called the Alvaro GIANT capable of running Windows, Android or most anything else, and we couldn't resist getting our fingers all over it.
Windows 8's finger-focus has spawned some interesting form-factors, and following in the footsteps of Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga comes the Panasonic Toughbook CF-AX2, a rugged twist on the 360-degree hinge concept we've been playing with here at CeBIT 2013. A compact 11.6-incher with a 1366 x 768 10-finger multitouch display, the CF-AX2 runs Intel's latest Core i5 processor for lengthy runtimes - Panasonic claims up to eight hours on a single charge - and, thanks to some hot-swappable battery magic, allows you to switch out for a new power pack without shutting down.
Many government agencies and companies around the world may be ditching BlackBerry for iOS and Android, but the German government is thinking quite the contrary. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other agencies in the country have been announced to be using the new BlackBerry Z10 as a daily driver because of its security features.
This week the Hannover, Germany-based international technology conference known as CeBIT began with a welcoming keynote hosted by four extremely influential minds. First was Prof. Dieter Kempf, President of the German Association of Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media e.V. - BITKOM. Also speaking were Dr. Thomas Enders, Chief Executive Officer of EADS, H.E. Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland, and Dr. Angela Merkel, Chencellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
MSI is in a froth of gaming frenzy at CeBIT 2013, with a new 27-inch gaming-centric all-in-one PC taking pride of place in the updated range. The MSI AG2712 squeezes Windows 8, Intel third-gen Core i5/i7 processors, and a touchscreen into its slimline chassis, but also finds room for a discrete graphics chip. We caught up with the new model to find out whether that made it special.