CES 2016 Wrap-Up, Part 1

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CES 2016 is now history and most of us are home, or at our next port-of-call. I have seen various attendance numbers but it’s somewhere in the range of 175,000; it was busy, crowded and impossible to see everything.

In my opinion the main categories this year were:

Autonomous vehicles stole the show. We covered the NVIDIA announcements and the commitment by Volvo to use the new NVIDIA supercomputer in a cigar box for their first autonomous auto offering. Even though it has not been announced, we saw evidence that the NVIDIA PX-2 unit is going to be used in many auto offerings over the next few years. We will continue to cover self-driving cars.

Drones continue to generate a great deal of attention. There were even more models offered by even more companies, but there is a back story that has little to do with the hardware—more on that in my next article.

Of course there is the IoT, the Internet of Things. It is now possible to connect anything and everything, from your underwear to your toothbrush, to your music library and your TV or phone. While there are many new and upcoming connected things, the absolute leaders of the pack are health and fitness devices.

Also ascending in popularity, offerings and uses is virtual and augmented reality. The first commercial units are now available, and a number of concept and pre-commercial units were shown. My opinion is that virtual reality will be popular for gaming and for entertainment, but I predict that the uses for augmented reality will greatly exceed those of VR. AR will be useful for entertainment, and also be widely used for industrial, communications, demonstrations and much more.

3D printing has made great strides lately. This year, we went back to see the folks at Voxel 8. They have made a great deal of progress, especially in the area we are interested in, which is the use of 3D printing to manufacture PCBs. Overall, they have gone from a startup company that had just received its first significant funding to a growing, maturing company that is gaining market share in an exploding industry segment in just one year. (Our interview with one of the founders of Voxel 8 should be live in a week or so.)

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