Innovation Monitor: Flexible Screens, Flying Cars, and AI Pets — It’s CES recap time!

Innovation Monitor: Flexible Screens, Flying Cars, and AI Pets — It’s CES recap time!

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Welcome to this week’s Innovation Monitor. This week we’ll focus on this year’s CES 2021 conference. Against the backdrop of all the political, societal and pandemic intensity, this may offer a respite — so read and click on to stories about gadgets that stretch the imagination.

CES is a whirlwind, an open and voluminous event, and even though you never know what small percentage of the ‘out there’ products will make it into the real world or get an actual ROI, we’re excited by the moonshots and dreaming big. It’s one of our favorite times of the year, even if it’s virtual.

This week, we’ll be highlighting some of the more intriguing devices spotted at CES 2021. If you want a general roundup, Wired has a great mix of slick gadgetry, funky robots, and serious innovation, from lab-produced personalized blends of breast milk at BioMilq to EV batteries that use 70% less cobalt.

Thank you for reading!

All best,
Erica Matsumoto Health The face mask quickly became ingrained into Western culture by mid-2020 — so much so museums began selling out of souvenir masks by July last year. Vogue recently published a guide to fashionable face masks. We shouldn’t be surprised that hardware giant Razer made a reusable N95 respirator that looks like a gaming rig on your face.

The project doesn’t have a release date, but current specs include microphones and amplifiers to project your voice, rechargeable air filters, and, of course, conspicuous LEDs.

Flexible Screens One trend we’ve been eyeing from the side has been foldable mobile devices. Sure, early foldable devices look a bit bulky and are ridiculously expensive, but the concept of a form factor other than a thin rectangle is still exciting. At CES 2021, unrollable tech from LG and TCL garnered some attention. Wired has a fitting (if not underwhelming) analogy of what the tech feels like — it’s like unwrapping saran wrap… but it’s better to see the concept in action:

Robots Samsung showed off three new robots at this year’s CES, and Bot Handy was the most Jetsons-esque, sporting a long mechanical arm capable of performing some household chores like doing the laundry, placing dishes in the dishwasher, and even pouring a glass of wine. There is no price of release date for Bot Handy, but another Samsung bot, the JetBot AI Plus vacuum, is being released this year. JetBot sports object recognition, LiDAR, and 3D sensors… and even empties its bin at its charging station.

AI Pets Moflin appears to be the more adorable, AI-enabled offspring of the Furby, the 90s and early 2000s toy that sort of led to the mass popularization of home robots (and consequently, a circuit-benders dream). Created by Tokyo-based Vanguard Industries, the Moflin project raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in a very successful Kickstarter campaign.

The robot pet sports accelerometers, gyroscopes, touch sensors, and microphones, which it uses to express “feelings” via adorable sounds and movements. Apparently, each Moflin will “develop an individual personality over time, depending on the environment and ‘how their owners treat them.’”

Sustainability The recycling rate is the ratio of waste recycled to the total waste generated. It’s a widely used indicator for monitoring recycling progress. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the recycling rate in the US was 35% in 2017 and 32% in 2018 — better than 1960 (10%), but still low.

Aldous Hicks recently presented his idea for a robotic recycling bin called Lasso on a TEDx talk, which worth a watch. Hicks’ idea is that you drop an item into the bin, it analyzes it, and if it’s recyclable smushes it to a more compact form. The bins are due for 2022 and will launch in the San Francisco Bay Area for a price of around $3,500.

Automotive GM’s keynote this year had a few awesome moonshots like an flying car and self-driving pod, along with a slew of electric vehicle teasers. CNET covers the more corporeal parts of the presentation, so let’s take a closer look at the Cadillac eVTOL air taxi and the Cadillac Halo self-driving pod.

EVTOL stands for electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles — so it’s a generic name. The concept vehicle uses a 90-kWh battery to zip along at 56 mph. Really, all we have is a rendering for now.

The Cadillac Halo is a concept autonomous car featuring “biometric sensors that can read passengers’ vital signs and change the temperature, lighting or even the cabin scent to keep everyone as chill as possible.” Again, no details on release.

Compute For the standard CES chip announcements, CNN has a nice roundup of new hardware from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. But our eye was on Intel-owned Mobileye’s (sorry) big news at this year’s event. At CES, the company announced a LiDAR system-on-chip set for 2025 — which is a great fit, given Mobileye’s unprecedented access to the chip giant’s manufactuering resources and LiDAR’s prevalent use in autonomous vehicle tech.

We covered LiDAR in a previous edition, where we explained how the tech uses a laser to send a pulse and record its return (actually, millions of pulses simultaneously). The system’s timer then uses the speed of light to calculate the distance of the pulse traveled before striking an object and returning.

“Mobileye’s solution [pictured above] relies on so-called frequency modulated continuous wave technology, which instead sends out a constant stream of light. FMCW systems can calculate both the range and velocity of objects, which makes it more effective than time-of-flight.” According to Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua, “you will be able to see hazards on the road from 200 meters away versus 100 meters away.” Smart Beauty You might conjure images of smart mirrors and AR filters when you think about “smart beauty,” but this year’s high-tech beauty products were a lot closer to home. Yves Saint Laurent Rouge Sur Mesure is a $299 device that mixes lipstick shades into a range of custom colors. You can use the accompanying app to “choose your hair color and your eye color, and [the app] will recommend you palettes of shades that, based on scientific color data, will most likely will match well to your features.”

And to end on less practical (and more CES) note, Ninu just might be the world’s first smart perfume. The perfume is linked to an app that lets users select from various ratios of fragrances based on mood. “Or, if you’re feeling creative, you can concoct original mixes like some kind of nightclub DJ-turned-chemist.” (Shudder)

This Week in Business History January 8th, 1889: Herman Hollerith patents the first electric machine that tabulates numbers from punch cards.

It was an important precursor of the modern computer, and through growth and merger, Hollerith’s company eventually became the computer superpower IBM.

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