Gadgetory

look at this crazy keynote how did this happen let's say you're in town you make laptop chips and server chips and they're good but people don't really care about that stuff that much anymore so what do you do well you hold a giant keynote at the biggest Electronic Show of the year to tell a new story but let's say a week or so before your giant crazy keynote there's a huge massive security flaw in every computer chip made in the past 20 years that could slow your stuff down by as much as 30 percent well then what do you do if your Intel you do this before we start I want to take a moment to thank the industry for coming together for another purpose to address the recent security research findings reported as meltdown and Spectre the best thing you can do to make sure your data remains safe is to apply any updates from your operating system vendor and system manufacturer as soon as they become available well that was awkward but it was necessary Intel needs to be honest about spectre and meltdown but it also wants to tell that other news story and when you're at CES the only way to tell a story is with a gigantic crazy light-up spectacle intel decided to let me go run around backstage at a rehearsal to see how that spectacle gets made so we did that all right so it's a couple days before CES actually kicks off and we're here at the park theater at the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas going backstage to look at Intel's keynote they're rehearsing right now we're watching lots of crazy stuff happen with data lines flying from a piano to a RV our guitar players and we're expecting a lot more so let's go see what happens backstage at a CES Keenan so I am on the stage this is surreal I've never given a keynote before later on we're gonna see a giant helicopter drone thing called the valo copter takeoff right here on stage there's gonna be a car self-driving car that comes out and man I don't even know until it's really really motivated to convince you that they should be part of your story of the all the data in the universe and they want to also remind you that you know the chips are good and even though they had to slow them down because of that security thing they can do cool stuffs that is the CEO of Intel Brian krzanich we were originally going to interview him about Intel's announcements right after this rehearsal but then meltdown happened and he decided that he needed to cancel the interview but he did give us this photo bomb so I guess that's nice I wonder if he knew what I was talking about when he jumped on camera now Spectre is everybody's problem not just Intel's intel has a bigger problem you don't buy anything from them you buy from Apple and Amazon and Microsoft and sure there's often Intel chips inside that stuff but you don't care and why should you they're not right there right in front of you anyway there's so much more that they showed us at their stage so let's get back to that CES is when Intel can get in front of you it creates this massive production this gigantic show to convince you to care to get you to feel as connected to Intel as you do to your phone that's why Intel's keynote starts with sports it's directly involved in the thing that you actually care about Intel has these camera systems that are pointing at football fields and with them it knows where the players are like characters in a video game so you can see the game from the perspective of the quarterback it converts everything that these camera sees into these things called voxels now imagine a Rubik's Cube each of those cubes is a point in space now imagine a rubik's cube that covers an entire football stadium then imagine you can see and crack every single one of those cubes intel is doing the same thing for the Winter Olympics it's gonna let them create VR experiences from the games Intel's also getting into understanding other kinds of spaces like roads so it partnered with Ford to make better self-driving cars all right so now we're gonna go look at the Ford Fusion self-driving car what's interesting about this car is it's actually part of a fleet they are rolling up on a hundred or something of these things and they actually intend to have them on the road they say their level four yeah we wrote in the car right there on the keynote stage Intel's also trying to understand where things are in the air it's helping make the valo copter possible which is this gigantic helicopter drone thing that both companies hope will someday become a self-driving vehicle like a Jetsons cover we got to check out the vallah copter up close and see it fly during the keynote behind a giant glass wall right there in the room oh look at this so this is the shooting star mini it is it looks you know it weighs like next to nothing you've probably seen a lot of these you know little home drones that you can get that just fly all over creation like this this is much more stable I think you know they had the little light show going there's obviously income chips in here to power it it seems yeah it seems like a good little wrong until has tiny new drones that can safely fly around indoors now you can't go buy one but you can't go buy a hundred and turn them into a choreographed dancing star field it doesn't look like much on the screen that you're looking at right now but in real life seeing those tiny points of light moving in a cyclone right above your head is kind of amazing all the stuff happening on stage is just bonkers crazy the floor is a giant screen pillars and balls of light descend and ascend from the sky the weird of wild graphics on the screen they ride the line of a dystopian future hellscape but they don't quite cross it there's acrobats wearing completely crazy LED suits and helmets jumping around on trampolines the spectacle of it all the sound and the fury the planning and above all all of the money it's all designed to convince you that Intel isn't just a boring PC chip company did it work yeah the problem here is Intel isn't actually trying to tell one story it's trying to tell half a dozen one of those stories is about data did you hear it's the new oil sure they're also telling stories about quantum computing and neuromorphic chips and whoever else Intel is kind of famous for making product demos that never go anywhere the problem is Intel wants to be everything to everybody which is impossible so it often feels like Intel ends up being kind of nothing to nobody this year Intel's actually showing you stuff you're going to be able to experience which is refreshing the real story here is that Intel can turn real objects in space into data on your computer other companies know about pixels on a screen but Intel is on a path know about real 3d space but that story it got a little lost in all the spectacle and again getting lost in the spectacle is the oldest CES story of all so for much more of what's happening here at CES 2018 go to youtube.com slash uh verge hit that subscribe button and prepare to soak in the strangeness of the Consumer Electronics Show