Anyone here go to CES who can corroborate the linked story?
I didn't see the crashed companion robots. They were working when I walked by, but I didn't pay them much mind because I thought they were stupid. There were also a number of advertising robots which show up every year. They have screens for heads/chests and don't do much of anything useful. The new addition this year was a French model that was built like a Heroin Chic Supermodel instead of the superdeformed look that most of the Japanese companies opt for.
IMHO, Google's voice stuff was more common than Alexa this year. It actually got annoying to hear someone say "hey Google" for the millionth time. Even the goddamn Monorail was saying it.
Cruzr was a big robot from a Shenzen company. I really liked it. I have seen Jibo in action .. the Cruzr I saw had a personality that surpised me!
I thought there was another laundry robot that won a prize. I went to a "demo time" but it wasn't a demo .. it was just a talk. They had a video from inside the robot and they were obscuring things. My personal opinion but I was very annoyed at the lack of demo (so were others) and felt they might be hiding something.
The table tennis robot was pretty awesome and so was the dobot magician. I could hardly believe that the same arm was used as a 3d printer, a lazer engraver and a paint brush.
Some of the VR stuff I saw was disappointing. The pimax guys were running the Blu demo .. what a horrible demo to show case their tech. I couldn't tell a difference between it and my oculus. I tried the HTC vive pro at the Intel booth and it was decent (I was able to clearly read text). But what blew me away was the Sansar VR demo.
I was stupid and skipped the Intel wireless headset demo .. kicking myself over it. Saw a bunch of engineering demos that were very cool.
I will say that VR was kind of absent last year and was absolutely everywhere this year. It still feels like we need a couple of years before the VR stuff is fully baked though.
One thing I like about CES are the frank conversations with engineers. This year, I reached out to a few people. Had a very nice conversation with Karl Guttag (he has an optics blog http://www.kguttag.com/). I'm a newb in this area but had burning questions for a while .. he very patiently explained optics 101 and some of the implications. Very nice guy in person.
I also spoke to/saw engineering demos at the TI booth in LVCC, AMD and ARM booths at the Venetian/Sands, NXP and Qualcomm at LVCC. They have some private demos that are by appt only but usually let you in if you ask politely. I just went up and said I would like to know more about X or Y. Is there an engineer who can help me?
I also missed Kopin and Vuzix. Time was short and I could not find them :/