203: Top Five and More From CES 2024

[Music] on today's episode of still to be determined we're going to be talking about Matt's trip to the strip that's right Matt visited Las Vegas to go to CES 2024 and we're going to have a quick chat about the tech that he saw the hits the misses and no we won't be talking about his wife we'll be talking about the misses in Tech sorry about the confusion there everybody hi everybody I'm Shan frell I'm a writer write some stuff for adults I write some stuff for kids and I'm just generally curious about technology and luckily for me my brother is that mad of undecided with Matt frell which takes a look at emerging Tech and its impact on our lives Matt how are you doing I'm good you're firing on all the cylinders today with the bad dad jokes that's right we're recording this one a little later in the day so I have had all day to kind of like Get Ready Get gted Up plus my son is now back back at college so I really don't have a place to be expending all that Dad joke energy uh my partner you go literally flees the room when I start so there's only you that's you and our listeners are fine fine listeners say every listener is going to put up with this that's right enjoy it everybody before we get into our conversation around Matt's trip we would like to revisit some of our earlier episodes as usual I like to go back through the mailbag and see what all of you have been saying on our previous episodes and going back to episode 2011 this is Matt's ask me anything that he did and there was this comment from B CER who wrote One suggestion I have regarding technology and ways to incorporate it into our daily lives workplace charging I think that workplace charging will be a big driver of EV adoption I think you and your channel would be a perfect fit for exploring workplace charging how it's being implemented and the benefits for the employer as well as the employee workplace charging is the answer for apartment dwellers who cannot charge at home overnight is this something that you have seen is this something and we'll combine it a little bit maybe with the CES discussion was there anything in this vein at CES as far as like employers workplaces Tech that might be something that would be running in the background not at your home or necessarily in places like hospitals malls out in the world but places specifically targeting the workplace environment and the technology there yeah I I didn't see any specifically at this yes but there is this Tech out there for helping workplaces set up um charging uh at kind of scale across their parking lots so that you could add it as a perk like you work for us you get free charging or or it could be you create an account and you're you're charged a small fee for the energy you're using there's also things I've been seeing in Europe along these lines where Office Buildings have bidirectional charging put in so their employees could sit there plug their car in it charges up but then the building and the utility can tap into that kind of mass battery of all these cars and then the owner of those cars if they're participating in that get a little like discount or a little cash back on their accounts for participating in that so this is stuff that you're starting to see kind of slowly kind of get some traction yeah um for me the bidirectional stuff is the one that's most exciting but it's also the one that seems to be for some reason taking forever to to kind of roll out it makes sense that this like you mentioned this being a kind of perk the various things that workplaces put into their practice around Transportation like the pre-tax uh tax benefit of um commuting costs like I have the ability to if I stock if I sock some of my paycheck away I can use that pre-tax dollar to buy my metro card in the city for example so it makes sense you might have a pre-tax or taxfree energy benefit for employees who might be bringing their electric vehicle to the lot it starts to cross into strange territory though when you think about what if you're the one person who doesn't have yet an electric vehicle and everybody else is benefiting from something the lack of equity there might be a head scratcher or a thorn in somebody's side but I think that's something that will be ironed out in the wash as we move forward and this Tech becomes more and more um pervasive in all these different ways for sure there was also this comment from episode 202 this was our discussion around wind turbines for the home a new approach and this was built largely around Matt's convers ation with Chris and Cheryl who are the heads of Harmony turbines where they are developing what they think might be a solution to the problem of high winds size and scale uh effectively their wind turbine looks a little bit like a large coffee can folding in on itself it has this really unique design where the arms open up the canister effectively opens up to catch the wind but if it moves faster and faster in higher winds those arms slowly come back in allowing for the turbine to still operate in higher winds which as Matt's video points out is a problem when higher winds normally cause turbines to need to be shut down so they literally don't rip themselves apart so Chris and Cheryl in their startup trying to make a a technology that is not only more resistance but more available to the homeowner and there were comments like this from Lord Dragon who said they seem to be on The Cutting Edge congratulations to them and also comments from people like Rio KAG who wrote I would love to have this Tech on my property even if it's an outdated unit it's better than what we currently have which is nothing and I think that's an interesting take on this did they talk at all about what they see as the life cycle of this technology I got the impression that this technology might actually last longer in their Vision than our more traditional windmill style turbines and if that's the case unlike solar I don't know that there would be a secondary market for this kind of design what did you think in your conversations with them about that we didn't address that specifically um because I think it's a little too early days for them to say like they were kind of Cy about what it might costs it's because they don't know yet so it's the same thing with something like longevity but I I'm pretty sure they would feel like these would last a very long time there are components of it would that might need replacing because they'd wear out like some of the mechanical Parts might need to be replaced but you might not need to replace the entire thing so it's there's this this kind of thing probably does have a longer lifespan than you might expect where the um horizontal ones maybe 10 years 15 years uh for these H sized ones uh if they don't fly themselves apart um so it's like I I I wouldn't be surprised if these would match or beat that at all on now to our discussion about Matt's most recent episode this is his discussion around CES what he saw he saw a bunch of stuff that the video takes on a real have you ever wanted to go shopping in Blade Runner feel it was it was a bit like oh yeah I'll take the giant hologram projector and and install that in my home the idea of a television which is seethrough until you need to actually use it one of the things you didn't mention is okay it turns effectively into what might be considered just like a large picture frame on the wall so it has that kind of like visual impact where it stops being the thing you see which is not being used and turns itself into something that looks more decorative is there any planning from anything you heard at CES are they like yeah these could be windows I imagine the technology that's going in you wouldn't want it to have rain hitting it but it seemed very amenable why not just making a window and yes th this is the thing where it's like you think about the use cases for this and the first places that come to mind are stores it's like this makes perfect sense for like a storefront or a window front um the middle of an aisle where people are walking on both sides of it or something like that it makes perfect sense home use it gets a little uh dicey um some people I've talked to were like you know they have an aquarium it's like imagine you know that's kind of in the middle of room imagine this is kind of away from the wall in the middle of the room and you could have it um or room divider where people have you know like fireplaces that are two-sided so two sides of a room they're separated by a wall you could have something similar like this but yeah this is the kind of thing where I would absolutely imagine seeing this in storefronts or Windows uh first um because it's like I said for home use I I have I have zero desire for this thing yeah ever um but I could I can see like a more of a niche market for it than anything else but I got it I said in the video it was eye popping to see it in real life like when it came out in stage I kind of did a double take of like wait wait what and then when I saw it in person like I was up close to it it was just mesmerizing to to watch but at the same time I was just like n I'll pass yeah I imag like in my own trying to apply it to places that I think would make sense in my life I was thinking similarly storefronts um you having the ability to have a bunch of these in your front storefront window and having an ad swirl away and then literally be looking into the store so that like you know well Mattress Firm suddenly being like showing these people enjoying mattresses and then it goes to a clear window and you just see the showroom of of mattresses that kind of thing another another use case might be offices it's like imagine like my job before YouTube spent a lot of time in conference rooms some of these conference rooms had big Windows Overlook out of a skyscraper it's like you could instead of having a giant TV on taking up a wall you could have the TV in front of one of those windows and when it's not in use it's just full daylight everything coming through right but then when you're having a conference call it goes opaque and then you have the image right there so there's space and light and it keeps things bright and Airy for situations like that I could totally see that being a use case too I can only imagine what the price tag is though oh it's got to be so expensive it's really also kind of interesting to think that the sales pitch is would you like to spend more money on a screen than you normally spend so when you look at the screen you don't see the screen that's right yeah still see your money thank you very much look at the big brains on Brad and that's what a sales pitch so you talked about things like there was energy storage breakthroughs that were being marketed lots of modular stuff which seems to be trying to find a way to Branch not only scale upward but also downward and as somebody who lives in an apartment where I don't have the ability to say like oh I'll put that in the garage I'll put solar panels on the roof and stuff like that the apartment uh the balcony solar panels the modular Storage Solutions do you see you mentioned this briefly and I'd like to you just talk about it more the way that the trend seems to not be hitting the US to scale downward that way versus other parts of the world were a lot of these products being brought To Us by were they being brought to C Us by non us companies is that the trend where the companies that are outside the US have a market that they see and the US they don't so they don't they don't follow that path is that the the kind of breakdown this is pretty much think about it like a lot of Chinese companies um there were imagine a factory makes these modular systems and then they're branded with three or four different brands but then there are some Chinese companies that are doing more Boutique things just for themselves so most of the stuff I was seeing were Chinese companies um Chinese manufacturing that kind of stuff and I talked one company his name was uh the company's name was Mars I think it was and in talking to him he was the the rep uh was saying they don't have a distributor here in the US so one of the reasons they were at CES was trying to find Distributors for our market so there's all these technologies that are just waiting to come in but there's just nobody to sell to the end user right now um and they're not going to build out their own sales infrastructure because that's a huge amount of effort and work when these companies are basically f are technology companies there's battery manufacturers they're just packaging it up and they need somebody else to sell it um the exceptions are eof flow and anchor which I talked about in the video they have their own distribution Network so they are the first ones that are starting to kind of Hit the us but the other aspect of the thing that's slowing this down isn't just I think interest it's policy because the way these systems work still kind of breaks my brain Sean um you get this battery pack and it has like a little inverter box so you plug the battery into this box and then the box then plugs into just any standard household Outlet in your apartment and we think of outlets in our homes as oh energy comes out of the hole yes well energy can actually go back in too right so just by plugging this thing into any standard household Outlet you now are backing up your apartment you have two-way power going in and out now granted is 120 volts here in the US 15 to 20 amps so you're not going to be able to go above that amount so it's it's not a ton of energy to be feeding back into the outlet but for an apartment you may not have a lot of stuff that you'd be running on in a blackout or things like that anyway so it's maybe just a fridge or something like that right it's probably just fine there's regulations around that that are required to approve that and one of the first countries that's doing this is Germany they have policies and rules in place that people in apartments can do this but I was just uh somebody pointed this out to me I think it was on mastadon uh there's a YouTuber that's in Germany that's done a lot of stuff about this I was watching a bunch of his videos with like the auto translate on it it was it was fascinating to hear how it's breaking down but like it's kind of like here in the United States if you want to get solar in your home and you live in a homeowners association a lot of HOAs can go nope they're ugly you can't get them right apartment dwellers I want to get satellite TV nope it's an ugly dish we don't want building so policy had to come in place that say HOAs cannot stop you from getting solar uh apartment owners cannot prevent you from getting Sal Light TV right German's kind of in this weird place where the size requirements of what you can get for your apartment certain sizes don't need a landlord approval they still need utility approval but they don't need landlord approval and others do and so that Germany's starting to change some of the rules and regulations I'm hand waving this I'm not giving exact details because it's still kind of wrapping my head around it but that's part of the reason why you're not seeing it here in the US because it's it's kind the technology is moving faster then yeah people can keep up with it well a use it's a use that is was never envisioned when any of these policies were being written and regulations were being made nobody I mean our power grid is effectively now like 100 years old probably and so to think back to somebody saying like but what if somebody someday comes up with a way of making their own power and they want to feed it back into the system how do we handle that exact nobody was thinking that so it makes sense but it also does then put the onus on us the end users to start pushing our Representatives reaching out to them regarding this policy perhaps right to your local city council members right to your local legislators at the state level start pushing the idea of like we need Solutions here because if you're going to start having if you're going to continue to do what we've been doing which is we effectively push the Environmental Protection on to the end user then we as the end user need to ask for these things I'm not defending the idea of the end user ultimately being the best place for all that responsibility to be put I don't think it is but that's currently largely what we have and given that it means use your voice so if people are listening to us and have been to CES and saw these things and want to be able to engage with them start reaching out to your policy makers and start asking for the ability to do these kinds of things yep was there anything that stood out as a huh that's interesting but it didn't make the grade for your video was there something that you thought I'll revisit that at the next CES and see if they've actually been able to make it happen oh that's a hard question to answer there was there was stuff I saw that was kind of like really that's a thing I liked I liked in your video where you were saying there's a lot of stuff that maybe will work for us and it was a robot that looked like its arms were made up of of macaroni pieces that were all super super bendy and it looked like a giant weird jellyfish or octopus and so I thought I'd like that to make me a cup of coffee yeah Samsung and LG both have their own little household robots that you can buy now that you can get and they've been making these now for years and showing them off a CES and it's like vaporware it's like look what the future be we have this little robot that will roll around your house it's a ball it will just roll around your house and do stuff and now companies like Samsung and LG are making them to actually start selling them so like it's it was vaporware a few years ago but now it's like Samsung's like no we here's our the one here's the iteration now that's actually going to be sold later in 2024 and I looked at those robots and I watched some of the Demos in person and I was just kind of like yeah no because it's like what is the utility what is the utility of these things it's like they're so limited in what they can do it's basically like having an Amazon Alexa or you know Google smart speaker or a homepod on Wheels essentially is what it is and so it's like would you want to come home open your door and have a little robot wheel up to you and go hey Sean welcome home you like I I don't need you right now get out of my way I'm just trying to come in the house and then it's like trying to tell you what you've missed over the course of the day it's like no I don't need this like little yippy dog or or like little kids saying mom mom mom look at this look at this it's like just you know what I mean you don't you don't need that and that's what these current things are Samsung's had a projector in it which is kind of neat and they one of the demos they showed was a woman exercising and it's projecting the exercise routine she's doing on the wall and because she probably doesn't have a TV but but this is where this is where it gets interesting it's like she's exercising in a workout room and then she sits down to do sit-ups and when she's doing sit-ups now she's looking at the ceiling and all the robot did was just roll backwards and another the screen on the on the on the ceiling as she's doing workouts it's like okay that's neish but yeah that's not a um that's not making me want to buy this thing it's like no it's just a projector and smart speaker on Wheels and smart assistants at this point are kind of useless they're they're barely useful at this point so it's kind of like it it's like the the cart before the horse a little bit right so it's something I'm interested in robots are coming it's just way too early days for that kind of stuff right do you think the the version of robots this is something I think about are we trapped in our imaginations that have been built largely around sci-fi stories as to what a robotic environment around us would look like in the form of Here Comes C3PO and he's going to help me by making me tea and bringing me my paperwork and checking in on me if I need anything at the end of the day or are we going to just have a lot of smart devices that are going to be around us discreetly working together in a way that we don't see but it's just like you want that cup of tea and you say in your living room I need a cup of tea and then when you go up to the kitchen the teapot has made itself a cup of tea and we won't have a butler okay so my take on this is going to fly in the face if I know a lot of like technologists that are very gung-ho a lot of companies like Tesla and others are trying to build a humanoid shaped robot right now like there's a race to build one of these things and I get the rationale because our world is constructed for us so doorways and steps and it's for our human form so by making a robot in a human form they'll make it easier for them to become more useful and utilitarian to us throughout our lives I get it but but that feels like robots Adon Isaac as them off okay that's a 100 years from now where maybe we get stuff like that but for our lifetimes I am full in the camp of we're going to have Boutique robots that are designed for specific tasks so my Robot vacuum it's a robot didn't need to be a humanoid shape it's just a little disc that rolls around the floor I actually just got last week I'm testing it out now a robot snowblower it's like it didn't have to be a human oid shape it just looks like a little tank with Treads and a big like blower in the front of it so it's like you can make things that are going to make our lives more useful and they're robots but they're more utilitarian than they are humanoid I will admit that the Sci-Fi comedy nerd in me wishes though that your Roomba was in fact humanoid shape the idea of the robot coming out of the closet to clean the floors and then getting down on its hands and knees and going it's just really appealing to me and a robot snowblower that again your garage door goes up and a robot steps out and then just starts like picking a panfuls of snow and throwing it as fast as it can off the driveway we're missing out on opportunities for comedy is what I'm saying we're we're too focused on the technology we're not focused enough on the humor so what do we do about that who do I write about that who's the policy person I need to reach out about that some comments on the video that that caught my eye like this one from Stover who wrote in to say a deep dive into those new highdensity solar cells would be awesome there's also this one which is a very uh touching uh comment I think from James Mayes who wrote in as someone who is hearing damage from the Army and has trouble with speech discrimination in crowded spaces I would love to learn more about the orom device when you have hearing damage and you can't hear the person across the table from you in a restaurant you end up losing more and more places where you feel comfortable the fact you might be able to solve the problem in a way that doesn't mean just being isolated will be hugely impacting on so many people's lives thank you James for that comment that's a very impactful uh sort of great use case scenario and I'm wondering that ties into accessibility and this came up in uh between Matt me and a different um context the idea of accessibility uh talking about that not only on the Channel but incorporating it more on the channel in the form of there are plugins that are available that would make things like uh subtitling descriptions for uh site impairment and also um transcripts available for people who need to read the podcast or our discussion instead of being able to listen to it and Matt I wonder how much did you see around accessibility at the show were there companies that were incorporating accessib into existing things or were there new products like these earphones that seem to be really taking a stand and saying like there's a very specific group of people for whom this might be a key solution there was a lot I I didn't get a let me say it this way CES is massive and I was there for two days out of an entire week um I didn't get to go through the there's like a biotech health section that I didn't even get to go into into um I didn't get to go there there was probably countless amounts of what you're talking about there but like Oram there were some robotic companies that had little robots that are assist of devices for people who are you know unable to like pick things up here's a little robot that can go pick something up for you and bring it to you so there's a lot of that stuff that is kind of becoming I think commoditized would be the right word it's it's it's coming or it's here already and it's um definitely going to help improving lives I mean it was part of the reason why I got really excited about Oram when I was walking through it was a little show after the Expo had closed it was in the evening and I went into this show and it was called pepcom and I saw that booth and was I was walking by I was just like caught my eye of like immediately oh this is interesting this is GNA help actually improve people's lives and that's the tech I was trying to look at because oh my God joh there's just so much crap would be the best way to put around it was like finding the stuff that looked like it was going to be impactful was the stuff that was catching my eye the most and so this stuff is definitely there um I just next year I want to go and go for a couple extra more days and get into that Health biotech section for the ziga kind of stuff the Oram earbuds were they designed entirely around the use of it looked like a plugin that goes in the B bottom of the phone yep which helps with probably firmware to be able to make everything right properly because I imagine latency oh it's okay it's about latency so you end up plugging that in and using that to be able to like we just talked about you have trouble hearing in a movie theater so you have that it's focused in on the the movie screen or you're at a crowded restaurant and you can't hear the person across the table from you so you plug it into to them do the earbuds also work just as regular Bluetooth earphones that you could then like disconnect the thing and then just walk around and listen to music or you know have a phone call if you wanted to I didn't ask them about that I assume the answer would be no um because the earbuds my understanding is they're basically just kind of like the earbuds themselves are kind of dumb devices that are connecting to that dongle that your phone so it's using some kind of proprietary Wireless protocol that's very low latency and the reason for that is all the processing is really happening on device and then radioing back to the your earbuds because it's it's too much is going on for an earbud to be able to do it by itself right so if it's going back and forth like that it would be very if you doing over Bluetooth or something like that it would be there' be this latency so as somebody's talking it's like their mouth would be ah head spaghetti western right so I I think because of that I don't think they're like a Duo it's Bluetooth plus this thing I'm I'm assuming just based on my conversation with them that it's it's dedicated to that dongle and that's the only way to do it but you could use it to listen to music there's nothing would stop you from doing that right did they have a price point on it uh that was something I didn't talk to them about I'm kicking myself but my guess would be it's going to be not cheap just knowing how the stuff goes maybe a few hundred bucks uh would be my guess but for somebody that needs something like this I think it would be worth every single penny and on top of which our mother has hearing aids and hearing aids is a is a segment rip for disruption it is crazy expensive for hearing aids right now I've actually already started seeing stuff that's about like the hearing aid Market Tech that is built around that that is using phones as the plugin and it is I think you're right it we're and that may have a downside there's aspects to hearing that like a doctor helping you fine-tune the range that the hearing aid is working at is critical for hearing aid again our mother's experience we know from uh dealing with her that it's a very specific range that is impacted um but I'm at the early days myself of my partner saying to me why is the TV so loud and it's because somebody can't hear what um so something like this for me might be the step before the full-blown hearing aid so well there's just really quick there's something with um this is not an apple show but Apple airpods there's already it already can do some rough you know removing noise and allowing human voices to come through it's not like the the or Cam the orcam was specific voices Apple's devices just as just human voices so it wouldn't help you yeah right but there's already assist of stuff in the operating system I think Android may do this too but don't quote me on that where you can go through an turn on accessibility mode and it basically does a kind of a pseudo hearing test with your airpods in and then after it's done it creates a custom EQ profile to make up for the frequencies that you're low in so just already today just with some of the devices we already have access to there are ways that you can actually improve what you're hearing around you just with airpods and other earbuds that are already in existence so it's I'm very excited for where this is all heading it's it's going to make it better for you and I we need need this help later in our lives and you've talked in the past about Apple watches wearing them for tracking of health concerns but the tricorder that you saw and I'm going to call it a triar I don't care what the company that's making it is calling it it's a triar we're calling it a triar it's a triar from now on uh something like that is that was that promoted as like home use or is that doctor's office use are they talking this is home so it was literally like something doesn't feel good and you have the ability to say like okay here's my temperature here's what my blood pressure is and this thing is going to listen to my heart and check my blood flow like stuff like that yeah well just to kind of show how interested I am in this Tech behind me over my shoulder back here there's a tri quar replica and then you probably you probably can't see it but down on the desk I was a Kickstarter backer of a company that created something called the scano Scout and it was this little disc um that was a beta tester on it that it you put it on your temple and hold your fingers on it and it would take your temperature do an ECG do all this kind of like blood oxygen level all in one go off this one device and it was I got it because I was like this is a track order I gotta get this um that Tech didn't actually become a product for consumers but the advances they made the C the company spun it off into other things mhm this wiing thing that you're talking about this Tri Corder I saw is basically that in product form that I was talking about so it's it's meant for home use so imagine you have like when we're on on lockdown like tella health so it's like you have a a you could have a doctor's appointment what are the things they do to you when you go to the doctor's office just for a regular checkup they take your blood pressure they check your blood oxygen sometimes they weigh you they take your temperature it's like they both do stethoscopes to listen to what's going on this little device does not all of that but most of it so it's like you could remotely give access to your doctor on one of those tell calls to this device and you could be holding the device against your chest and he could tell you to put it down lower you put it over here and he could literally listen to your chest from the comfort of his own office you know what I mean right this is I'm super excited about this dech I've already kind of put my name into the weit list for as soon as this available to buy because I I I want to try this thing out it's really cool I already feel bad for your cat hey Luna you're gonna be you're gonna be standing behind her with she's a cat in that vein uh David Gray jumped into the comments to say the earbud Tech is getting extremely close to the universal translator from Star Trek so was there anything like that that you saw that was like live translation interactive that didn't matter what language you spoke to a thing you would be able to communicate with it not that I saw there but again that's actually built into our devices today already it's like you can hold up Google translate on your phone and like speak to anybody you want but there's that lag they have to finish saying what they're saying and then it translates it and then you say what you say and then it translates it back and you're having to show screens um I did not see anything where it's like real time like you're at the UN and have something in your ear and you're hearing a real-time translation I didn't see anything like that but I Sean I still want that yes me too me too so listeners was there anything that you saw in the video that you would like to follow up more on or is there anything in our discussion that you think we skipped a step and you'd like to us to revisit it jump into the comments and let us know and if you can't think of anything specific you could jump into the comments and just say Matt's trip to the strip and uh let us know what you thought about the general discussion thank you so much for the comments they really do help Drive the content of this show and they also help inform the content of Matt's main show undecided with Matt frell don't forget his CES discussion he asked again and again which of these texts would you like a deeper dive in so jump into the comments there or here and let him know and we'll see those episodes as you show interest don't forget you can support us by leaving a review you can go wherever it was that you found this program leave a review there don't forget to subscribe and please do share it with your friends all of those are great ways to support us and if you'd like to more directly support us you can click the join button on YouTube or you can go to still tbdm click the become a supporter button it allows you to throw some coins at our heads we appreciate the welts and once the bruises heal we get to the hard task of having a conversation about robot assistance thank you so much everybody for listening or watching we'll talk to you next time [Music] oh

2024-02-06 09:02

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