here with a preview. Ian scher, Editor at large at Cnet, Good to see you.
We know gm alphabet, meta twitter and a number of other companies
already ditching their in person attendance plans due to the um crown variant.
How do you expect this to have an impact on the annual event?
It was going to be a very weird event.
Anyway, I mean if you remember last year, January 2021,
we were just coming out of what was a really tough holiday
season with people getting sick that we already had figured out.
CS, which is the largest trade show in America,
save for one that is for the construction industry having, you know,
we decided to have that remote
and it was pretty muted, right?
Because a lot of the tech companies said, you know what? This is a tough year.
We're not gonna really try to make a lot of waves and I
have a feeling that this year is going to be somewhat similar,
although there are some really interesting innovations that we're likely to see.
But generally speaking,
the tech industry is struggling just to get stuff to our homes,
let alone come up with new ideas.
And so I'm not expecting a lot this year because of that.
Oh,
interesting too because we know this is the first si es trade show
where the products that are going to be debuted were created post pandemic.
So with that in mind,
what do you think are some of the biggest trends that we'll see
in terms of um philosophies like work from home or home office tech.
Yeah, health and sensors are going to be the name of the game this year.
We're going to see all sorts of ways that
people are trying to build sensors into our lives.
For example,
one of the things that's made apples apple watch popular with
some people is that it has a fall detection feature right?
Where it literally will ask you if it notices that you fell,
whether or not you're okay and then it calls the authorities.
If you don't respond
those types of technologies,
they're now going to start moving beyond what Apple has done into
other devices that are focused on specific markets for elderly people,
for people who are in extreme sports and all sorts of stuff like that.
So you're gonna see a lot of that stuff.
You're also likely to see a lot about entertainment, right?
And CS has always been about entertainment, but
in particular the virtual reality world.
While it's something that feels like the hype went up and then down,
it actually did particularly well during this holidays,
meta facebook sold what seems to be a very high number
of headsets based on some of the outside data we have.
And so as a result it looks like there's going to be a lot of competition,
particularly because rumors are apple is going to
start talking about this stuff possibly this year.
Can you mention maybe any other big reveals that we
can potentially expect in terms of virtual reality augmented reality,
the metaverse?
Yeah, I mean,
I think what you're going to be looking for particularly is that we're going to see
a number of companies trying to kind of rush out their competition to Apple Right.
And this is a really fascinating trend that we saw
happened a decade ago when the ipad was coming out.
All the rumors were,
that was going to come out in late january and CS
was right before that we saw a bunch of tablet competitors,
particularly from Motorola there,
zoom tablet was really getting a lot of tension
and then Apple came in and wiped the floor.
And so I'm curious to see whether this is going to be different.
You know, a lot of what has been challenging the VR and AR industry is
making this stuff easy to use, but also affordable,
which is a really hard balance to strike.
And right now it appears as though facebook meta is the only one in the game
that's pulling that off.
So seeing whether anyone can offer something competitive will be very interesting
In just about 30 seconds left.
Anything else that we missed that you're really looking forward to at this show.
I, I really enjoy the Tv stuff.
I, I, you know, maybe it's because we have the Super Bowl very soon afterwards,
but there's always some really nifty tv things.
So one of my favorites LG has shown off for a couple of years,
a tv that rolls up like a poster board into
a box and hides away when you're not using it.
And I have a feeling that that kind of idea is going
to further and further kind of become more and more reality,
whereas right now it's very expensive and I need to look at,
but not something that you or I would ever buy.
Alrighty insurer Editor at large at Cnet.
Thanks so much for that wrap up of si es and what we can expect.