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Las Vegas Trip, Part 2 — 2015 CES WEST

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January 31, 2015·9 min read

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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

This post begins with the first impression of entering the WEST hall (an introductory note), and then introduces the main exhibits: wearables, smart home, camera-based home security, and products from small teams that are drawing worldwide attention.

1. Introduction

If the EAST hall was a space where you could see innovative products built on the infrastructure and tech of big companies, the WEST hall seemed to be set up to showcase experimental products led by small and medium-sized companies.

Perhaps that's why there was a separate area in the middle of the WEST hall showcasing both prototypes that are not yet commercialized but are drawing global attention, and products that haven't yet received global attention but are highly anticipated domestically.

As I said earlier, the EAST hall featured large-scale items like smart cars and high-resolution displays; the WEST hall featured wearables like smart watches and small-scale items designed for the smart home.

2. Wearable products

Right as you entered, you ran into a small device that lets you learn about your body — SKULPT.

Body-info devices are usually made as wearables for continuous measurement, but this one only touches the body when needed. Unlike existing wearables you wear like accessories that give relatively inaccurate info (like a digital pedometer), its advantage is collecting detailed body data in a very short time.

"Wearable" usually brings two preconceptions. The first that comes to mind is "does that have a market?"

But to understand the market usefulness of these products relative to R&D investment — before getting into price and per-customer revenue — it might help to first ask, "Why is the world enthusiastic about wearables?"

The biggest keyword behind the wave, I think, is "Life Log."

"Life Log" means recording people's lives. Having realized the "value of the everyday" — which used to slip past us — people are no longer simply recording their own routines. The life-log data, once gathered, is analyzed to find patterns.

Just look at users on Cyworld, MySpace, Facebook, or KakaoStory. They take genuine pleasure just in recording and storing their lives, and they put significant interest and effort into sharing that with their neighbors and finding common ground. That's because it is "special information centered on me."

Increasingly busy members of society, with smartphones and other mobile digital tools, can now communicate faster than before. In other words, as time for meeting people face-to-face shrinks, the quickest way to maintain relationships and express oneself is to leave a record via a life-log service.

That culture started with posting on Twitter and Facebook, and then social-stats services began to emerge so that the data/records could be viewed more easily. People started using their networks and acquaintances to confirm their identity and values, or as an indicator to improve themselves toward who they want to be.

A product that embodies that current is Jawbone UP.

What Jawbone UP means isn't just that it's the start of wearables or IoT products — it's that, despite being an accessory-type product, it wasn't sold on brand preference or cutting-edge-technology prestige, and it's a good example that a product like that can still be competitive in the market.

What they're trying to make isn't the digital version of the familiar pedometer we all know and recognize — it's a product that "improves daily life and motivates you."

Through this, you can see that at least in the West (the US, the UK, etc.), consumer tendencies and behavior are shifting toward respecting and slightly improving one's own daily life. (Some might find that a bit ticklish.) Another personal thought: the attitude Westerners have toward moments of everyday life — how they give them meaning — may, oddly enough, be more "Eastern" than today's Easterners.

To collect life-log data more accurately, many of the products were designed as accessories that are easy to wear or carry on the body. And to help users understand all that specialized, segmented info, the UIs were often infographic-style, with small and light displays and devices.

Among the body-tracking products, there was one that stood out.

Its form differed from existing wearables. Instead of making a "smart product" look like "smart(-looking) + product," it took an analog, household-object kind of approach.

https://www.bellabeat.com/home

Besides the gaugeless weight scale covered in wood, they also showed something like a wooden stethoscope for listening in on a fetus's state (?). Rather than drowning in careful tracking or precise measurement technology, their direction of trying to connect with people emotionally was striking.

Thanks to this, I got to spend time thinking about what it could mean to "make a smart device or precision electronic product look like it isn't one."

3. Smart home

Life-logging and tracking didn't stop at one's own body — there was clear movement toward applying them to the indoor spaces that form the backbone of daily life.

No product had yet reached the popularity of Jawbone UP or Fitbit, but, unlike the old ubiquitous/home-network concept that came and went, these were drawing a lot of attention from many visitors.

Just as wearables are being designed not as measurement gadgets but as everyday accessories, smart-home products are also being shaped as interior props — close to daily life — rather than as "smart-looking" controllers.

(made by mother)

As I said, the concept of "ubiquitous" existed ten years ago too. Compare it to the case of smartphones — it seems something like this:

I think the old "ubiquitous" concept belonged to 1).

And I think the current IoT-based smart home is similar to 2).

On the other hand, think of Nest. Their approach feels, if anything, closest to 3).

So was ten years ago a failure because it was too far ahead of its time? Honestly, I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, today's device called the smartphone has come back to the same external form as back then, offering similar features.

They say "perception never changes facts," and indeed forming new perceptions and mental models is extremely hard. Changing something already seen negatively into something seen positively is even harder.

I thought: maybe the reason famous people keep invoking the humanities is not that we should study literature more or read more classics — but that we should approach things a little more humanly, a little more routinely, a little more mentally.

Then, what exactly is the old ubiquitous home network that is supposedly similar to today's smart home?

Past "ubiquitous" / home-network concept diagrams:

As you can see from the diagrams above, the smart home — like its predecessor — collects information from the products and tools that make up the living environment and processes/manages that data into useful information. To do that, the focus is on combining CCTV and security tech with various low-power sensor technology for tracking the living environment.

The one thing that's "improved" is that you can now check the tracking data in real time on your smartphone.

Given that we've put attention and improved technology on collecting/storing/processing data, I think we now need to put attention on how users use and apply information.

Concepts that must be reflected to complement the old ubiquitous concept:

We need to shift from a control-tower-based network and management style to local network management; only then can the vision of the old "ubiquitous" era be realized.

Products and services borrowing the word "smart" keep multiplying.

Look closely. Among the products called "smart," none of them are self-contained (at least as far as I know). Smart TV, smart Phone, smart fridge, smart home, smart watch, and so on. So what's the difference between those and their old versions?

Whether or not we call something "smart," the criterion is: "can it connect to the internet?"

Take TV. What's the difference between a digital TV and a smart TV? Beyond resolution and the form of the data exchanged with the broadcaster, what new effects can the added internet bring? Is it more convenient?

Viewed in context, what they're trying to build as a "smart product" might be: "can it reach or intervene beyond the principals (the device-user signal/information exchange)?"

And what the average consumer sees as a smart product might be: "through this product, can I receive, in information form rather than raw data, what I need right now — and can that information help predict and improve, not merely reflect the present?"

4. Security and cameras

You can't leave security out of the smart home. System-level security is of course important from the engineer's or maker's perspective, but from the user's perspective, the main concern is "situational" security.

The most common approach is CCTV.

But CCTV, putting aside its function, has a fatal drawback in terms of purpose: it is "after-the-fact." That is, it is focused on recording the moment of an incident, not preventing it. It can't stop bad things from happening.

It's a good technology, but personally I think it's tech for tech's sake, not tech for people. It's built purely for the maker's benefit — to clarify responsibility and prevent disputes. So I was happy to see a product that tries to improve on this issue.

Another issue is that we can't watch that massive amount of footage. Most cars now have CCTV/dashcams, for example, but how many people actually watch them? You don't look at the footage until after an incident.

https://www.netatmo.com/en-US/product/camera#view2

This product lets you check situations in real time and offers each scene broken down by time and timeline, so you can scan by the conditions you need. If users are registered, it recognizes visitor faces and adds them to the timeline options; when an unregistered person enters, it sends a notice to the registered user.

And existing CCTV also has a technical limitation: angle of view. Just as a person can only see what's in front of them through their eyes, a camera can only capture what the lens is pointed at, so blind spots are inevitable. These blind-spot limits cause many negative outcomes. For instance, in the recent daycare incident, the teacher knew where the camera was and moved to a spot she thought the camera couldn't see, where she did the bad thing.

The product below, on the other hand, lets you see a 720-degree view.

http://ic720.com/

It provides image data in real-time mode (with some buffering), and you can use the touch screen to control the 720-degree view in any direction — up, down, left, right. That alone makes it a very promising product.

5. Small and medium-sized, but strong products

Beyond those, there were plenty of products that had been in the media even before CES 2015.

1) Flapit (https://www.flapit.com/)

A related article: http://postview.co.kr/1166

2) Ring (http://logbar.jp/ring/en/)

This product is made in Japan. As is always the case, new businesses and product launches come with external and internal worries. To minimize those risks, they used the social-funding platform Kickstarter to concretize their idea. In Japan, their zero-to-one journey is being intensively covered.