Robot Toilets, Vibrating Headbands, and Other Oddities at CES

This week, we recap the news, trends, and stand-out gadgets from the first-ever virtual CES.
electric minivan
Photograph: Sono Motors

You'd be forgiven if you didn't pay much attention to CES this week. There's been quite a lot going on outside the world of consumer tech, and the virtual event wasn't nearly as splashy as the Las Vegas extravaganzas of years past. Still, there were a bunch of gadgets on display this year, and we pored over all of them to find the most important devices and trends, from rollable screens to cleaning tech to X-Men arcade games.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED digital director Brian Barrett joins us to talk about the good, the bad, and the just plain weird of CES 2021.

Show Notes

Find our picks for the best of CES here or watch the video here. Read more about rollable phone screens here. Read more about all the clean tech at CES here. Follow all of our CES coverage here.

Recommendations

Brian recommends Athletic Brewing non-alcoholic beer. Mike recommends the Instagram account Siblings or Dating? Lauren recommends journalist Sachi Cunningham’s Instagram account, seasachi, for photos and videos of surfers on giant waves.

Brian Barrett can be found on Twitter @brbarrett. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

How to Listen

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Transcript

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

LG: Mike, did you find it a challenge at all to pay attention to CES this week with everything else going on?

MC: No. I really just put my blinders on and had this intense focus all week.

LG: All right. Well, maybe I'm projecting a little bit, but I'm guessing that other people were paying attention to much more important news. So if you want to catch up quickly on what's going on in consumer tech land, we've got you covered on the Gadget Lab.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music]

LG: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED and I'm joined remotely by my co-host, WIRED senior editor, Michael Calore.

MC: Hello. Hello.

LG: We usually celebrate your birthday during CES, but we couldn't do it this year in person for obvious reasons, so happy birthday, Snackfight.

MC: Thank you very much. I still ate a lot of Thai food on my birthday, just like I would have if we were in Las Vegas.

LG: Well, that's I guess a nice consolation prize. All right. We're also joined by WIRED digital director, Brian Barrett. Hey Brian. Thanks for joining us.

Brian Barrett: Hi, thank you guys are having me. I ate a lot of cake this week, unrelated to anything.

LG: You should probably just say it was for Mike's birthday.

BB: We can say that.

LG: All right. If it missed it, I can't say I blame you. We're still finding our way through a devastating global pandemic, and here in the U.S. we're reeling from a violent attack on the Capitol in DC. Now, a second impeachment of Donald Trump, but CES was this week. The giant Consumer Electronic Show. Normally, we would be huddled around a microphone in a hotel room in Las Vegas right about now, but of course the situation is different this year. CES went virtual for the first time ever, so we spent the past week sifting through online briefings and showcases to find you the best of CES. We're here to give you a recap.

In the second half of the show today, we're going to talk about some of our personal favorites from CES, the oddities, the novelties, the stuff we thought was cool or useful, or again, just plain weird. But we thought it might be helpful to first lay out the broader trends we saw this week, because those are the things that are going to set the tone for what tech looks like in 2021. Brian, as our digital director, you were juggling a lot of things this week, but what stood out to you most during CES?

BB: I'm going to take a little bit of a different approach to this. It might be a little bit of a cop-out, but hopefully not too bad. I was interested about what we didn't see. I think first there wasn't like one really big breakout product at CES this year. Not that there always is, but I think that's also just a function of the remoteness of it all and all being online. But I thought too, you didn't hear a lot of the buzzwords that you normally do. There was not that stress of, "Oh, it's the phone, but it's got 5G or it's this trashcan, but it's got AI." We dropped a lot of that buzzwordy stuff for better I think. I'm not sure if that's just a function of, again, just not as many people participating this year or what it was, or those things seeming less important or just being more mainstream now.

I think in terms of things that I did see, I thought there was some interesting COVID-related tech specifically around ... I think there were three or four different kinds of, at least, smart face mask, which I don't know if I want that much technology on my mouth at any given time, but it's there, it's coming. Some hand wave faucets from Kohler that you sort of wave your hand and the water comes out. Little practical solutions to real-world problems, which is the kind of stuff that's less glamorous at CES, but is always kind of fun to see. Then I think what I want to know is what you guys think about. My favorite thing at CES, which was the rolling screens, which were suddenly everywhere, I'm curious, Mike, if you think those are here to stay or to exist. Are we going to be owning those at some point in the next year, two years, three years?

MC: I do think so. It's important to note that what we see at CES is sort of like magical thinking stuff. It's often what a manufacturer wants to show you because they want to give you a demonstration of how they're thinking about the future. So, the device you see at CES is rarely the device that ships, but what we saw this year along those lines are two phones. One that was teased very briefly by LG. It's a smartphone with a rolling screen. By rolling screen, I mean, if you can imagine you tug on the screen to make it larger, sort of like pulling a roll of saran wrap out of its box and then it springs back. So, the screen can be made larger by tugging it horizontally or vertically. In most cases, that's the design that we see. We saw two. One that LG teased briefly in a video as part of their press conference. One that the television and mobile device manufacturer, TCL, showed off in a little bit more of a refined presentation. We got to see a lot more of that device.

Now, these are probably here to stay. We talk about flexible screens, we talk about folding devices, but when you fold a phone, you end up with something that's pretty thick, right? Because you have two screens that are facing each other stacked on top of each other and it's pretty thick. With a rolling screen, you can make that magic small screen, big screen, small screen, big screen. You can make that happen, but you can do it in a way where the device itself stays pretty small because the screen just sort of retracts. To answer your question, yes, I do think we'll see that.

LG: I wonder what that means for the software that's going to run on these devices, because I think with dual screen mode, or folding devices that have some kind of hinge, even if that hinge is relatively invisible, it seems like there's still a delineation that exists in the UI. If you're running two apps side by side, or you unfold the device so that the app you're using expands, there are probably pretty clear code lines for how that app is supposed to work. What does the software actually look like on a device that's rolling? Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

BB: I think you're not though because ... And especially, I mean, Android specifically supports folding phones. They have documentation for developers to follow. I don't know that they're there with rolling yet. I think you're kind of out on your own in the wilderness with that, getting people to embrace those form factors is going to be ... and by people, I mean developers, and just people is going to be a little bit of a nightmare. I do like that you can feel like you're like a medieval messenger, unfurling a message from a faraway kingdom. That is the only reason I would buy one.

MC: Except instead of showing up on a horse with a flag, you show up on an e-scooter with a vape.

BB: Yeah. Like a little Segway seated scooter, going 12 in a residential zone.

LG: I look forward to the Samsung August event this year, instead of it being the Samsung Note, it's just going to be the Samsung Scroll. We're all just going to unfurl our devices into the worlds.

Brian, I have to say, there was one press conference where I heard not only multiple buzzwords, but such a strange combination of buzzwords that it made my head hurt. I'm glad that you didn't hear as many as I did. It was the TCL press conference on Monday morning. I said, I looked at the sentence for 30 seconds too long. They put together AI and IoT so it was like AIxIoT, which means artificial intelligence crossed with or fused with the internet of things. It was awful. Anyway, please don't make that a thing. People, don't make AIxIoT a thing in tech. It's too much. Anything else that you think is worth noting about this year's show?

MC: I would just like to note that normally CES is as much of a car show as it is a gadget show, even though cars are gadgets. Usually we get a big announcement from every single one of the big automakers. This year we didn't have that. They were conspicuously absent. We did see some fun self-driving concept vans. There was one from GM and Cadillac that looked really cool. There was a solar-powered minivan from a company called Sono Motors, which I was get confused with Sonos Motors. It's like, they started making cars now, since when? Mostly the auto announcements were very small. They were like software updates. They were in-dash things. Jeep Cherokee showed off something that I thought was pretty cool. A sound system designed by Macintosh, the high-end audio company. The in-dash display for the sound system actually has moving VU meters, like your dad's old stereo from the '70s, which was just so bad-ass. Aside from that, most of the news that we see around transportation usually comes at CES and there just was not a lot of it this year.

LG: Right. I will point out, I think two trends I thought were interesting this year. Really they were extensions of the trends that we saw emerge in 2020 due to the pandemic. I think our working from home and trying to teach our kids at home led to greater demand for laptops and better laptops. Certainly I think that was a trend during this week at CES because we saw experimentation in chip sets and things happening in laptops that are either going to make them better for gaming or give them better battery life or make them always connected with LTE modems in them. I think that's pretty exciting, even though as I like to say, it's the stuff in laptops. It's not the tech you can necessarily see.

Then our excellent podcast producer, Boone Ashworth, he's really an every man folks. He does it all. He wrote a great story about "Clean Tech." Our obsession with hygiene this year. We've always talked about the CES flu before, but that has new meaning now in the time of coronavirus. Boone did a great roundup of the different ways that tech companies are trying to like pitch sanitizing products, whether it's UV light or UVC light or anti-microbial materials and that sort of thing. Then of course, connected fitness. Connected fitness exploded in 2020. People are finding different creative ways to work out at home. Our colleague Adrienne So did note that not many hardware makers were at CES this week. Garmin and Fitbit and just companies like that. Withings, who we normally talk to all declined to participate in the virtual event. But I think we're going to see some interesting stuff happening on the software side of connected fitness this year.

BB: Yeah. Especially since Google just closed its purchase of Fitbit.

LG: That's right. That's been a really long time in the making. I think that that was first announced what was it? The end of 2019, that that deal was announced and then it went through some pretty tough scrutiny, both in the EU and in the U.S. and so yeah.

MC: One might even say they had to go through 10,000 steps to get there.

LG: I like that. That was pretty good, Mike. It was good.

BB: Any of us got app Apple Health or Apple's fitness program just launched in earnest too, right? You've got the big guys moving in while the little guys are trying to either maintain their position or establish one.

LG: Right. Samsung announced something this week, similar to that as well.

BB: And Bowflex is getting in with an elliptical kind of machine that you can do is. It's going to be ... I'm surprised there are that many instructors who are good on live streams that can sort of fit this many companies that have offered these live class experiences. I feel like ... I don't know. I feel like it's hard. It's hard to be a ... It feels like a hard thing to do, but everyone keeps finding more bike instructors who can do the job, I guess,

LG: Brian, all I have to say to you is trap your shoulders, drop your baggage. All right.

BB: Lauren thank you.

LG: You're welcome on that note. We're going to take a break and then come back with some of our personal CES favorites.

[Break]

LG: All right. Welcome back. We've talked a lot about the big overarching trends and some specific products we saw at CES this week, but people love to hear about the weird stuff at CES. Sometimes there are gadgets. We just, we think are pretty neat or too strange not to mention. All right, Brian, tell us about that X-Men thing.

BB: Guys, I was so excited about this if you're of a certain age and you spent a certain amount of time in shopping malls in America, the arcade game to play was this X-Men four player side scrolling game. You could choose from amongst six characters and it is a plot line to ripped from the comic books. It's terrific and if I'm aware of this, a company called Arcade1Up which makes these video game cabinets of old arcade games that are sort of miniature, so you can have them in your home and they've got a bunch of them already, but they announced this CES that they were making this X-Men game. I'm so excited about it. I really am. It's a big moment. I don't know that I'll get it, but I just knowing that it's out there in the world and that other people will experience this and enjoy it.

It means a lot to me that's, that's a genuine thing I genuinely enjoy, but I do want to note some other CES things that I radically enjoy a company has come out with a Keurig like ice cream maker the pods that you put in are like about the size of a red bull can and you stick it in and ice cream comes out and the whole thing weighs 50 pounds and is huge on your counter that's ... God bless them for trying and then the other thing that I enjoyed was a $500 headband that vibrates to get you something or rather aligned with your something or rather other which I think is it's not the technical term, but it's close and just make you a cape those good vibes you know what? This is the kind of stuff that I genuinely love about CES more than anything else and it's funny, but it's also ... These are people who had ideas and who made them a reality and I liked that.

I genuinely respect that and appreciate it and I hope it works out, but just the stuff that you never would have thought of on your own for better or worse coming to life is what makes CES so much fun and so rich.

LG: The ice cream thing reminds me of a product I saw , I honestly don't know if it was 2020 or 2019 because after 10 years, all the CES start to run together in your mind there was a beauty product concept where you would take a pod and you would put it into this beauty machine then it would know what your skin type was. Right. If you'd have combination skin or dry skin or aging skin or whatever it was, and that it would, it would put together some moisturizing stuff in the beauty machine then you would put your hand under the spout and the lotion would come out into your hand I remember seeing that and thinking, why wouldn't I just like pump a load model with the ice cream machine? Like it's 50 pounds and it uses pods, which may not be the greatest for the environment like, why wouldn't you just keep a carton of ice cream in your freezer and then scoop it out.

BB: Yeah I will say in their defense, I think they say that the pods are recyclable, but yeah, I think it's part of this, but there's like a sub-genre of, of a gadget. I think we reviewed a similar thing that does something like that for beer the idea is you can get a little ... You're on top of beer, but you have to buy these little pot. You could also just buy the beer. Right. It's very ... And the Keurig Kold is another example as Keurig tried to do a cold beverages thing that was also unwieldy and also pods. And Just like, just by the soda. I think it is a very specific type of product that keeps happening and probably will forever.

LG: It's personalized. All right. Mike what did you see this week through your screens that you thought looked super interesting or weird or fun?

MC: Honestly, the thing that I want, the most of everything that I saw at CES is one of the new LG refrigerators. It has this funny feature. I think they introduced it last year, it's a side-by-side fridge there's a freezer on one side and a refrigerator on the other, and you can knock on the door and the door is actually transparent and you knock, it lights up a light on the inside you can see what's inside the fridge you don't open the door and stand there and look at all this stuff and let all the cold out. That cool the truly cool thing is that LG put an ice ball maker into the freezer, so You can ask the fridge to dispense cube ice, or pebble ice, or craft ice spheres which you put in a glass and then you pour your whiskey in there and then the ice doesn't melt as quickly.

And then you end up with a better tasting glass of iced whiskey. It doesn't actually shoot the ball out into a glass because that would be dangerous. You have to open the door and reach in and grab a ball the fact that it mixed them and just like produces them in the same way that produces ice cube is just ... I love it. It's so silly, but it's something that I would actually use and it's also just an awesome refrigerator.

LG: How much would that cost?

MC: Oh, it doesn't matter. Probably $8,000. I don't know. I have no idea. A lot of times we don't get pricing on any of this stuff until it actually comes out, but it doesn't matter. Did you miss the part where I said it mixes sphere craft ice for your whiskey? Some of the other stuff that I saw that I really liked, there's a lot of headphones out there with active noise canceling in them. There were a few that really stood out one in particular from V-MODA, I've just about everything that V-MODA makes the company finally put active noise canceling into its headphones. They cost $500, which is still cheaper than the Apple AirPods Max. And one thing that we wrote about which I thought was really interesting. It's a company called Biomilq, what they do is once you are expecting, they extract cells from your body and they use those cells to make milk in a lab so that once you give birth, you have a simulacrum of your actual breast milk that you can feed to your newborn really cool technology, especially because traditionally they've been so many problems with lactation and babies being able to accept breast milk. The fact that this company has sort of helped people bridge that gap is really exciting.

LG: Yeah. I saw some comments online from folks describing basically their pumping scenarios, right how challenging it can be to pump while you're in an office or commuting even it seems like this depending on, of course, like the viability of the product itself and the nutrients and the product itself, it seems this could be a pretty interesting solution.

MC: Yeah, absolutely I'm also curious to hear what you saw that you liked this week.

LG: All right. I'm sensing a little bit of a theme here because we've all named something that has to do with the home, whether it's the Keurig like ice cream machine or LGS ridiculous refrigerator, so I have three things that stood out to me this week. One is the stillness bath from Kohler. Adrienne wrote about this for us. This is the most ridiculous tub you could possibly imagine. There's water filling from the bottom of it then it kind of spills onto this wooden moat. There's a mood lighting system. There's fog generation. There are aroma incense emitting from around it and it just looks super cool. It looks like the kind of thing you would go to Japan for. To go to a Japanese spa and sit in this amazingly sleek and relaxing tub. I love it. I want it. We have no idea what it's going to cost.

Like most other ridiculous home items we saw this week at CES. It would probably be very expensive. I thought that was super cool. Similarly, I thought that Toto's smart toilet. The toilet of the future. We wrote about this in our best of CES roundup everybody should go to WIRED.com and check out our best of CES. It's a concept toilet, but you can see where this is going. It uses a variety of sensors to not only figure out who is sitting on the toilet when you sit on it, but then it analyzes your "The press release" your key outputs it makes recommendations, wellness recommendations to you based on what you have been eating and one of the press release photos that we received showed a woman looking at an app, and it was telling her she needed to eat either chicken and salmon or avocado.

It analyzes your poop. Let's not beat around the bush. I made a terrible joke the other day about how we don't know if it's our number one gadget or our number two gadget, but it's up there that also, we don't know how much it costs, but it's probably going to be incredibly expensive whenever it ships in the next several years and then finally, who wrote about the ... Lawrence Trampy wrote about this for us. There's this cool bin called the lasso recycling bin. It's been in development for more than a decade the idea is that you put all of your recyclables in this and it steam cleans them. It takes off the sticky labels to prevent contamination. It's supposed to intelligently store all of the different materials for you that it actually grinds up the recycling before it puts it in an internal storage bin.

LG: And then I guess you're supposed to take that storage bin and put it out for recycling, it just sounds really cool I know recycling is a little bit controversial, particularly plastic recycling in the sense that I think we've all been getting a lot of information over the past several years, about how we should all be recycling plastic it turns out a relatively small percentage of plastic actually does end up being recycled but I think anything that we can do to help the process along and help the environment is good this just seems really cool it is once again, expensive, it's going to be around $3,500, maybe less Lauren wrote on our blog whenever it's available, but it's supposed to ship sometime next year, I thought that was pretty cool.

MC: It sounds noisy.

LG: Yeah, that's true. I guess that's a little different from just like putting it in the bin in your garage and forgetting about it until recycling day.

BB: Mike, when you're in your stillness tub, I'm still in this bath, no amount of recycling noise can bother you. Picture of this Mike you're in, you're stillness tub. You've got your headband, getting your situation sorted out, vibrating gently reach over, you play a couple levels of X-Men on your arcade. I mean, come on this is the future.

MC: And then at some point I enjoy the on-demand ice cream.

BB: Which your toilet then tells you to eat less of.

LG: Yeah, just put those V-MODA headphones on and you block out the rest of the world, all of the news of the day or the year.

MC: This is the future that I want to be a part of.

LG: Let's take a break from this unreality and then we'll come back with our recommendations.

[Break]

LG: All right, Brian Barrett as our guest this week, what's your recommendation?

BB: Well a lot of people are either doing dry January right now, or trying to cut back on drinking, even though it's an understandable time to be drinking but this company has been around for a while. I just discovered them this month and started trying them out this month, Athletic Brewing, which makes non-alcoholic beers that tastes more like regular beer than any non-alcoholic beer or ... I've had two of their types. There's the run wild IPA, which tastes ... It's not quite a full IPA feeling, but it's sort of like a ... It almost tastes like a session IPA it gets there and the stout, which is terrific, the stout I could not have told you it was non-alcoholic beer from drinking it and it's cold outside so it's a perfect kind of vibe, so my recommendation is Athletic Brewing. If you're doing dry January, or even if you just want to cut back a little bit, but you miss that beer flavor and feeling, and the stout, especially I found to be really, really great.

LG: That sounds really great. Is this widely available at grocery stores?

BB: It is available at grocery stores. I'm not sure how widely they also ship anywhere in the U.S. And the cost is probably a little bit more than your average six pack of actual beer.

LG: That is an excellent recommendation. I'll take that into consideration because I am doing dry January. I also like Erdinger. Have you ever tried Erdinger non-alcoholic beers?

BB: I have not, I like the regular Erdinger.

LG: I think you might like it.

BB: Yeah.

LG: Mike, what's your recommendation this week?

MC: I want to recommend an Instagram account. It's called siblings or dating. Are you guys down with this?

BB: I've not heard of it.

LG: Please tell us about this.

MC: As you can imagine, they show you a photograph of two people embracing each other, and you have to guess whether they are siblings or whether they are dating. Of course, it's fun because you're almost always wrong. They show you people who look exactly alike, and then it turns out they're dating or people who are gripping each other, maybe a little bit too tightly to be siblings and then they're siblings.

There are two ways to play. If you follow the account, you can play in real time through the stories, you tap into stories and then you see the photos and then there's a poll and you have to guess, and then a couple hours later, the person who runs the account shows up and tells you exactly what you got right and what you got wrong you could see the percentage meter of like people who were correct and people who are incorrect, so you could play in the stories, or you can just go to the page, the feed and every photo in the feed is a gallery that you can swipe through guess what you think, are they siblings, or are they dating? It will make your head explode, I guarantee you that it is infuriating and hilarious my favorite thing about this winter.

LG: Oh, this is hilarious.

MC: It's so good.

BB: Yeah. That's a perfect distraction in a time that we could all use one or several.

MC: Indeed, Lauren, what's your what's your recommendation?

LG: My recommendation is also an Instagram account just to back up the bus a little bit over the past week or so in Northern California, where Mike and I live, Mavericks has been going off. Mavericks is a famous surf break. It's off the coast of half moon bay it's an incredible wave. I mean, the other day on Sunday, in some instances it was as high as 60 feet it's the kind of wave where surfers fly in from all over the world. I mean, these are very, very serious legitimate surfers fly in to basically experience Mavericks, take their shot at it there's been a movie made about it. Of course, it's an incredibly dangerous wave as well, but it's really just like a sight to see in person. I had the chance to go out over the weekend. It was really crowded of course, because lots of people had gone out to see it.

I sort of went up on the cliffs and, and saw it. I mean, it's still like a pretty good distance off shore it's even hard to get the scale when you're seeing it in person, but it's just absolutely incredible.

That's bringing me to this Instagram account that I recommend you follow. This journalist name is Sachi Cunningham her handle is @seasachi she's actually someone who I've spoken to before for a story that I wrote for WIRED.com a couple of years ago she's amazing because she sometimes goes out in a boat with a group of other photographers, journalists, wave lurkers, and the boats sort of hang out on the shoulder of the wave, so people are at a safe distance, but they're still close enough to get their shot of the wave and Sachi sometimes swims out there, she goes out but then she actually goes in the water with her pretty serious wetsuit and her underwater gear she swims into this monstrous wave. She gets the most incredible shots of Mavericks. I really respect her work and her bravery in doing this and I think it's really cool I recommend you go check out, seasachi on Instagram.

MC: That's a great one. It's, it's just as terrifying as siblings are dating. I can adjust.

LG: All right. That's our show. Thanks again, Brian, for joining us this week.

BB: Thank you guys. Always a pleasure.

LG: And thanks as always to Snackfight.

MC: Holler, holler.

LG: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter, just check the show notes for our Twitter handles this show is produced by excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now we'll be back next week.

[Gadget Lab outro theme music]

LG: Mike.

MC: Lauren.

LG: Did you find it a challenge at all to pay attention to CES this week with—sorry, my cat is now eating the batteries that I just took out. Hold please.

[MC laughs]

LG: [In the background] No! No stop!

MC: Stupid babies need the most attention.

LG: No! Not good to eat those!

[Audio fades out]


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