1. [Las Vegas Trip, Part 1] 2015 CES EAST
2. [Las Vegas Trip, Part 2] 2015 CES WEST
3. [Las Vegas Trip, Part 3] POST 2015 CES
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This post begins with the thoughts I had when I first entered CES, and goes on to a post-visit review of the main displayed products. Detailed introductions to the displayed products and companies can be found on major online media outlets without relying on this post. So going forward, these posts will be less about the objective information you can already find elsewhere, and more about the incidental thoughts I had when I encountered a product. If you want detailed coverage of CES 2015, the links below may help. I personally recommend the Kookmin University site — it breaks things down into categorized sections with clear explanations. CES official site http://www.cesweb.org SK Hynix official corporate blog http://blog.skhynix.com/1059 Kookmin University http://www.kookmin.ac.kr/site/ecampus/new/press/4000 Mercedes EVs, Audi A9, BMW I8 M4 new info http://mr2.co.kr/won/link/?item_no=1295812 CES 2015 opens — soaked in LG's hot innovation http://social.lge.co.kr/view/the_bloger/ces_2015_lg |
1. My first impression of CES was "smart cars".
In the large outdoor booths set up across from the main CES hall, smart vehicles being researched by Volkswagen, BMW, and others were on display. But CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is an international consumer-electronics show.
So why are cars filling the grounds inside and out?
— Volkswagen e-GOLF
— BMW i3
I found a small clue in the BMW smart-car booth outside.
As hardware development has leveled up upwards (the New Normal era), the auto industry has begun to put out series of eco-friendly, high-efficiency cars. But since that's still a technology-based approach, I think it won't be easy to hold a sustained edge over competitors.
(For example, just like the shift from ever-thinner, ever-smaller phones to ever-larger smartphones, the market's demand seems to have moved from technical intensity to software usability.)
The smart cars had pretty much all the features we'd imagined. Some cars moved on their own; some automatically provided useful information through the navigation system. The BMW i3, due this March, also includes a big-data-powered navigation feature.
The i3's navigation goes beyond realistic 3D rendering; it combines various derived datasets on top of big data (3D-rendered city + city-risk information + navigation + route finding + big-data use for individual buildings + intuitive UI through color inversion, etc.).
It was striking that by grafting "big data" onto an already-existing object (product or service), they weren't simply providing "more" or "more precise" data — they were providing "information useful here and now."
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This isn't really someone else's story, I think. Even without applying big-data tech, when we built the DID (Digital Information Display) at the Cheongyang County Office — a DID that had been limited to the device's own functions — we used information from the website to provide more "useful" information, and I now think the DID and staff-guidance system there was a similar case. |
So the fact that smart cars have emerged as a key trend isn't just somebody else's story; rather, as a web agency earning a living, there are meaningful implications here for our own potential.
Mobile websites, mobile apps, smart TVs, and now smart cars… In the end, I think the "smart" keyword boils down to: how usefully can you, on top of the internet, apply information to the user?
Coincidentally (?), that is exactly the kind of work agencies like ours have been doing — day and night.
Even without bringing up the big words of smart cars or IoT, or the leading examples of overseas big companies, if you look at the DID we installed at Cheongyang County Office or the NFC artifact-guide system at the Gongju Museum and so on, you can guess just how close those are to what we've been doing.
2. Past CES keywords
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2004: MP3 2005: The convergence of TV and PC 2006: TVs bigger and sharper 2007: FULL HD goes mainstream; OLED debut 2008: Green IT (the 2008 global financial crisis) 2009: Netbooks 2010: 3D TV (the film Avatar), expansion of e-book readers, LED, 3D, IPTV 2011: Tablet PCs, leap in smartphone hardware specs 2012: Ultrabooks and Android tablet-PC adoption 2013: UHD, mobile processor performance gains, smartphone/tablet growth 2014: UHD, wearables (wristbands), smart cars 2015: 4K UHD, IoT & Smart Home, wearables (more fragmented categories), smart cars, 3D printing |
3. "4K UHD" and various display products
For TV, of course — and by a wide margin — Samsung and LG.
— LG
— SAMSUNG
Although the technical flavor is a bit different from Google or Apple, what's encouraging is that both Samsung and LG are getting serious about smart TVs with their own TV-optimized OS.
— LG webOS
3. SMART HOME
A smart home can be described as a service that implants low-power sensors into existing objects and applies IoT technology/concepts to control them wirelessly. The examples below are faithful to the basic concept.
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In fact, the smart home is similar to the old ubiquitous trend. If there's a difference, it's that the older approach was closer to the M2M (machine-to-machine) concept and was implemented around central control towers; now it's implemented around the IoT or IoE concept — using smartphone-app features for distributed, intelligent handling. |
— Products aimed at the smart home
— These are from Belkin.
4. IoT
Belkin, in fact, is a company that makes jelly-style phone cases.
But unlike other case makers who stop at design or distribution, they've also focused on materials R&D.
It's because they thought about the emotional (or cognitive) connection between electronic products and their users. From there, they moved on to thinking about device-level connecting. And more recently they're thinking about device-to-device, thing-to-thing connections.
Like Nike — software for the hardware, and new hardware for that software — they seem to be iterating on a cycle in order to answer the user's fundamental needs and wants.
At a glance you might misunderstand that they're straying out of their territory. "What is a phone-case company doing making electronics?!" you might ask.
But think about it. Belkin may actually be more faithful to its original role than anyone.
Not one of their products implements a function entirely on its own. Just like phone cases, the products they make are merely "middle-men."
They don't make smartphones. They don't make tablets.
They focus only on the connection, pushed back to the smartphone. When the target of the connection is people, they develop materials based on human cognition; when power is an issue, they research battery capacity; and lately, to solve issues around data and the home (even everyday objects), they're seriously thinking about IoT products.
Thanks to the latest products built on new technology, they receive media attention and grow their sales. But they are, still, a smartphone-case specialist company.
Another IoT company you can't skip over is Parrot. Parrot's products are (knowingly or unknowingly?) familiar to us, too. They are the company that made the test sensors stuck into the flowerpots across from our meeting room.
— Parrot products
To us, Parrot is a company that makes a simple flowerpot sensor, but a closer look reveals technology far more advanced than you'd expect. They lead not only in smart home but also in smart cars, drones, and robotics.
5. Smart cars
(I already talked about smart cars earlier, and plenty of related information is online, so I'll skip it here.)
What I want to highlight, rather, is the variety of ways they used to communicate their technology.
Via the display terminals above, they used AR to deliver DID, camera, and website information.
With these features, you can see both the understanding and the usability improvements of mobile and smart cars at a glance. If you turned the large DID shaped like (?) a smartphone, the AR would show information relevant to the direction the camera was pointing.
6. Information delivery using DID, web content integration, NFC, etc.
— An interactive UI
— Information delivery through organic information composition tied to web content and an interactive UI
— A DID with NFC-based payment
7. After the show — internal meeting
1) Navigation + big data: reflect projected budget execution status in a 3D civil-services guide using colors, etc., to provide related information.
+ image -> Unity 3D (DID, if not the web)
+ internal —> usable for birthrate, crime rate, etc.
2) Double-sided kiosk + AR — Volkswagen
3) Survey of space and per-person cost
4) Possibility of multi-vision use — change form and DP per output
