Gadgetory

hello and welcome to top shelf this is our daily afternoon show about all the gadgets and gizmos and all the weird stuff we found at CES and there's a lot of it I was actually out on the show floor for like two and a half hours yesterday and it was the most exhausting thing I've ever done in my life just trying to look at things here to talk about it all of me is my long-lost co-host I missed you yesterday nilay patel you look so handsome I just and you're right that's what anything saying really nice things really threatening over this way I like them did a good job I kinda I want to cry right now I would like to carry you people I'm very tired so I hope you're ready for a free-form journey intimate it was it was it was kesho last night just ruined you forever you didn't come down from cashel until about ten minutes ago yeah pretty much also I watched I the four minutes watch blackjack yeah and then he didn't I don't know if S&E no no you later black I think that Michael Michael Shane one like 300 honors yeah good for my yeah i have always lost thousands of dollars playing blackjack I don't think I've ever want a hand a blackjack oh yeah uh our operations ascent Leo was there playing and she had this like what essentially like a bio-computer of nerds behind her telling her exactly what to do and the other and she won seven dollars in four hands like immediately but it was only because of this like brain trust of nerds being like I don't have to do some calculations do this and she was like Watson sitting yeah it was amazing everyone else was so mad that's often that we took our money and we ran away and then we spent the money other place and then they kicked you out and tried to get meet you up have a casino content because now they're making a movie it's the whole thing but so anyway there's lots of news to talk about this is day I don't know Dave 5000 if we been here like a thousand years yeah but it's like the last full day of cs right rain is our last show actually it is it's a last show CES it's gonna miss you I'm gonna miss you too so yes is kind of winding down its still there's still what is it like 160,000 people here yeah but the actual news the cool new stuff is all it's all there and yeah we've seen it all so we're gonna do is talk about some of the kind of the biggest things that happened and some vinegar trends and coolers and there's actually a lot you know I i think the the biggest overarching trend here is the rise like the indie hardware startup and how many of them are how many of them there are a lot of them are funded by kickstarter and indiegogo adrian's and greg reporter Matt right so a lot of the biggest stuff we saw this week wasn't from samsung or sony or panasonic like they all had these big kind of would you call them busts I kind of I kind of want to call their press conferences bus where they were like you know big bombastic and they're like 4k gems and like that's cool but nothing is really you know life-changing blowing my mom owns abilities I keep comparing I don't know why this keeps going up to me but like two or three years ago there was a sous was here and that they put out like 500 concepts my press conference yeah it was exciting and weird and so who is this company and like what are they talking about I literally don't know what you're talking about but that phone looks cool and that there wasn't a lot of that this year I think Samsung showed off like a curb to secure phone yet um but it's really the little guy some of whom aren't even on the show for who are here they've all got really cool ideas they're getting funding in a variety of like new ways basically right and there i think in adrian's piece the the difference is she's like Samsung and Sony those guys they look around the world like what the manufacturing partners are doing they're like okay that panel is ready and this chip is ready and now we're going to glue them together and that's when you smart that's a samsung and LG end up releasing the world's first TV it exactly the same all right and the indie guys are basically saying what do I want right and then I building that and that's really different yeah but then there's another trend which i think is really extinguishes there are there's a lot of robots nomination the show yeah and Paul Miller right yeah Paul Miller what's not on the internet you may have heard of him yeah he's not on the internet yeah that's all I know about him he's standing outside he is standing outside not on the internet at this moment that's very hard Paul you went sour irobot right yeah it's cold not on the internet yeah i went i robot yes we know we have heat on the inner uh so tell us what what did you what did you see it i robot what's i robot up to now well so the you know they got a new pool cleaning robot which is exciting at iRobot is doing exactly what I robot has always done which is they make these horribly boring not even that great vacuum cleaners now pool cleaning robot the louche which cleans your gutters nomad there's a new lose out at this year's CES does it clean your gutters banners what yeah and I better here's what I don't understand about iRobot night let me just ask you this question as far as i know i robot makes military robots right they can kill you right hey let me make a line they make a line of domestic robots Paul say don't kill you they can't kill fine they definitely kill you think can drive around and identify who to kill right and then they make a line of extremely boring things that can clean various parts of your home right do they make anything for consumers that is useful welcome so so for one they are selling a ton of vacuum cleaners and they are making money and that's what makes them like kind of the most interesting exciting best robotics company in the world is because they make money and they are a real business and you know for for like Toyota and Honda show off these great concepts but they never sell them to us room you know I wrote makes these rumbas and in these military robots but what they've been doing for years now is developing really great intellectual property and for the past two CS as they are showing off this thing called Ava and it's their mobility platform which can map out a space it can navigate a space autonomously avoid running into people and it's finally mature enough that it's going into a product it's the I want to get this right the rp-vita yeah which is a hospital telepresence robot and I got to play around with it it's just it's dead simple you've gotta like an iPad app like a doctor would have an eye app they pull up like a list of hospital rooms basically tap on the name of a room and the robot just drives there and and you really don't have to worry about it will map its own course it will avoid running into people and then so the top half of the robot is developed by in touch health which they bundu telepresence robots but they're like stationary before so this is like a really great commercial applications lot not for consumers it's about like five thousand dollars a month per a month to get one of these in the hospital but to be honest like as far as health care costs and when you're talking about like monitoring stroke victims and stuff that's actually decently reasonable and and so but again I robot is all about making this a sustainable business they're going to make money on this and the thing is that they've developed really great technology here and will continue to develop technology in this realm that will lead to eventually call an angle the CEO I talk to ya said about 10 years for a personal whole robot and there's a lot of problems still of a home robot to be really useful is probably gonna need to arm it's probably gonna need to be able to go up and down stairs yeah it's gonna need a base that's not as large so there's still a lot to figure out a laser weapon of some kind but they're of the Pat yeah laser laser weapon for sure but there are a lot of developments lately that our are getting getting closer I mean have you seen so here's my question i went to LG's booth yesterday and they were like we have an unprecedented new robot robot vacuum mmm it's a square oh it's like literally a square and they're like you've never seen a vacuum like this before like that's true I have not it's like this one this way I mean like are those companies a threat to iRobot today do they represent actual competition today and can somebody get this done in less than 10 years anything sounds like a question it isn't right well I Robot actually just bought another company I think evolution robotics which makes the mint which is square the mint is a it's a like it's like a swiffer robot so you put a Swiffer pad on it and he uses different technology for navigation and so you know I Robot bought them you know for that product which I think was a successful product it's a little cheaper than I robots own products but also intellectual property I think I think the sort of a race is on and called angle talks about how he sees the robot like they're being a robot Butler and you won't have to manage the little robots that are doing your little chores around the house you'll you'll engage with a robot Butler the thing is is that we are engaging with robot Butler's right now on our phones like with Siri and Google now and and call an angle admits the iRobot is not in the business of developing that sort of artificial intelligence yeah they're in manipulation and navigation and that sort of stuff so you know we might just be controlling our smart homes with our phones like we saw you know LG has those you know you touch your phones in the washer dryer so there's a question if we'll we'll have robots in our homes in that role that he wants I still think there is a role for a robot in the home with an arm that can do stuff pick stuff up folder you know fold your laundry make your bed but we're still like at least an order of magnitude maybe two orders of magnitude away from shipping something like that to consumers as far as price something that you would want in your home right now probably cost a hundred thousand dollars to build and you'd probably want to pay a thousand to two thousand dollars for something like that ultimately cool Paul thank you so much for talking to us I have to I just have to make it ten years and then I get one of these things and then call call angle says you know everybody always says 10 years that's a robotics like cliche oh he'll be in ten years and then it never happens call Nagel says he never says that so he's really serious this time ten years ten years I'm writing it down what's the date I don't know what the data is ten years from this January tip 2013 if I can't buy one burning the building down all right all of the buildings uh Paul thanks so much for joining us thanks guys so do you want to roll like I want a robot really that I had a rumor i was so broke in the day did you my favorite thing they've seen is that the DJ rumbas where you just put a speaker on top of a Roomba it's not an actual thing you just put a speaker on top of a room but it just goes around playing music I could get into that seems amazing I mean but that's not even a rope that's just a speaker that doesn't fit like bumps into things hilariously I don't know you said it like it's not the greatest they're fine so one of the things we've seen a lot of is like different way are you dare contradict me I'll go sorry this is a UH one of the things we've seen a lot of is like different ways to interact with gadgets that's one of the big things that's like how do we use our stuff and even robots kind of play into that it's like you know how we interface with the whole world around us um and there's a lot of it here oh yeah everything here is I mean it's kind of like this it yeah there's a sense and animation video and some stuff like that but there's a sense to where it's like it's like 3d was where the TV manufacturers told everybody in HDTV you know like man we got to come up with something else like that like what they sell on was 3d it's like everybody else is looking at Microsoft's on the connecting like we need something like that and they don't I'm not convinced that everybody has all the parts like Microsoft had with the Kinect yeah every yeah I mean that's the thing is uh it was when we were talking about the the Pebble watch yesterday dieter said something I thought was really smart he was saying there's not a lot of bells and whistles but like if you don't have all the bells you can make better whistles and I feel like that's what connected it's like this really basic thing that they did really really well right and all these other things are really cool and you know you see the possibility for like what leap motion blew my mind really i thought it was it still like it just the fact that it could recognize all of my fingers and then i could put a pencil in between my fingers and it would recognize that that was different from the finger that I'd like just was crazy and so there's all this stuff that you can do but it seems like what are you gonna do with it right it's like a fun novelty right answer russell brandom wrote a really great report yeah it's actually interesting all those companies are here but they're not really talking to consumers we have like little offices right we're like sony and samsung and microsoft they're all going to meet with them and see what they can do intel has a big push for what they're calling perceptual computing yeah I mean it's again like to me there's I have a definite sense that like everyone like woke up to touch and what Mike shots soon with the connect with natural user interface there and there's a big rush to like try it out and see see what they're you know version of HD will be right and there's I think there's me a lot of fallout yeah so one that we dig it's try out was the Toby eye tracker right this one which is another pretty wacky thing and Tom war and got to play with it so let's let's check that out hey guys it's tom warren from the verge and we're looking at toby's Rick's I tracking technology for windows 8 after a one time calibration you basically hold down the delete key and then you can navigate across the whole interface so this is working on windows 8 now so you can see that I've got my hand on the Delete key here if I look at mail and I hit delete it'll launch mail I can go and look at the Microsoft account team email on there and it hit the late game and it'll navigate to that so you're basically using your eyes to track where you want the cursor to be and then the Delete key will actually trigger that action so I can start a new email for a look at the plus at the top right and there's all sorts of other ways as well if we go into the maps application you can actually use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in so if i look at toronto and then i start zooming in and out it will do that navigation for you and then i can look to pittsburgh in the very left there and i can scroll in and out as well if we go back and then we go to Internet Explorer you can use the insert key and if I hold that down and then look to the bottom of the page you'll start scrolling and if I look to the top it'll start scrolling to the top so we saw this last year and Toby are going to be shipping this to consumers run in the year it seems like it's a lot more accurate than it was before I mean if I go and look at people it seems to be working quite well and I look at the desktop that's Toby's Rex I tracking technology for windows 8 I feel like all i want to do with that is like staying behind people as they use computers and just stare at things while they click and just wait and see what happens and that's a good confused I don't know may find out stuff it's like that's great but is it useful do you care like serving me by one of those yeah I don't know how much like is it that much more work so anyway the thing I think is the coolest of all of these wacky things that we've done and I an interesting combination of robotics yeah and you I and yeah is a self-driving car critical and so we yeah it's chris ziegler so Chris showed up to CES basically got off the plane and just disappeared for like days and days and days go on like where I have to go hang out somewhere I believe I assumed you were dead yeah gambling or those just those the only two thinkin serves me is that you assumed I was dead and you didn't think to do i mean about in here does it do yeah busy gambling i gambled in your honor i poured one out I appreciate that I appreciate that so what were you actually doing so I was deeply embedded in the world of auto journalism which is a very foreign huh thank for us but it was great i checked out lexus had a self-driving car here that they didn't actually demo but they've been demonstrating it privately in both Japan and in ann arbor michigan which is where Trina is located which is their research arm they've been doing that for the past five years and they just showed it for the first time publicly here and then we checked out Audi which eventually they're gonna get to true self driving cars but in the short term they're doing what they're calling a self parking cars basically you you walk outside your hotel you press a button on your smartphone and the car creeps around the corner at 2.1 miles and hours which which for the record is just astonishingly slow yes right but it's like awesome like the video you guys made is awesome yeah it's I mean it's it's Tennyson shields shields yeah you could but I wouldn't if he said shields I still wouldn't go into an area with gunfire right I wouldn't do it stop yeah that's the best in that and the first Batman you know oh yeah yeah yeah when the Batmobile yeah it's like he's like racing at it yeah walks out there to stop yeah yeah I love that this happened this mean but why would anyone do that right so i thought i would definitely if i was like the first guy on my block with that feature i would definitely talk into the phone like I was talking to the car remote late yeah and then everyone it was slowly creeping yeah you oh it's super 1oz bruh it's super creepy the first time it happens when the car just appears around the corner and there's no one in it it's it's weird so yeah that's that's what i was doing this week and so all these companies are like making a big deal out of this is the future this is like it crazy thing that's ever happened in the world so Ford's CTO Paul Mascarenas who we actually talked to this week said last year that Google has kind of pushed the entire industry in the directional driving cars like they force the issue and everyone is having to respond well in good for Google it's just too it's just a means to an end right like Google doesn't seem that interested in selling me a self-driving car but everybody else kind of caught on to the idea and is now doing it themselves I go drink us again would you buy the google has everything by the speaker like if Google made a car would you buy all you want I mean how many ads in your chain email Xperia it's like Google makes a card what whatever verizon samsung gonna do do it first true uh I swear that shit's gonna be here my copper droid car to open the car and make like a droplet sound oral I mean you know does have LTE actually the Audi does have LTE yeah they just before they were doing HSPA and they just have great deal to you right so but that's neither here nor there so they're going to get to the self-driving cars eventually but the problem is that they're very careful in the language that they use to describe these vehicles because they know that there's this looming legislative battle around getting these things legalized so they're being very careful not to call them autonomous cars not to say that they drive themselves they're like oh it's a safety feature like we're helping the driver you know and it's it was really interesting to hear the very very careful language that every single executive use to describe later trying to do here yet let me ask you the real question like it's not whether I'm gonna buy a Google car it's whether this technology and it's not even whether it's legalized if there's demand for it if people want it right the legal stuff look at sort of maybe it'll be a little bit slower than we'd like but it will definitely sort it out but without the demand there's no reason for Congress to like spend its time talking about self-driving cars right that's true but I would also argue that there are many things that people want that aren't legal I think that's fair yeah oh so actually I mean let's let's talk about some of this legal stuff cuz it's it's like we're not gonna get anywhere until we figure this out right and so russell brandom who's been a busy guy this week has been out has written some stuff on us for us about this before and is actually here in a totally different place from where Paul was a few minutes ago yeah it has to be very clear about that but so Russell tell us tell us a little bit about some of the the big legal issues that are going on here yeah um I mean the main thing is all the laws are written as if there's a driver in the car so there are all these things the driver has to be that autonomous drivers aren't gonna be they aren't gonna be you know conscious and they're gonna be in control of the car but it's sort of not it's just hard to make those laws work with essentially a robot driver like how do you give it an eye test how do you do sort of any of the things people do to get driver's licenses well it seems to me that the bigger problem is I mean you could you can do i'm sure you can develop a certification program for robot cars but our laws are punitive when you make a mistake let me punish you right and it's like how do you punish a robot driver for making a wrong decision you can call me what i was sitting in the past it's like you got your robot blew the stop sign yeah like it is bad robot I be wrong what's that what Russell what's that what's the situation with that stuff well the concern is that you sue the person who made the robot driver right so if it was you know if it was this this is why I think companies like Lex's are being so careful is cuz they don't want me to say oh I thought the Lexus was gonna sort of drive for me and it would be fine and if you getting that paradigm then anything it does Lexus could potentially be liable for a all those you sort of don't know until people start suing each other but it's also you know a 50 billion dollar like auto liability lawsuits are 50 billion dollars a years it's huge and so there's really it's kind of a dangerous pool to wade into I don't know I would just play in the robot I'm sure look what we need to do is develop robots that feelings and then you can blame them right if then you can blame them and they'll feel bad about what that done yeah i mean that's actually i think the most interesting of all the robot stuff like no one worries about the legal implications a vacuum cleaner that can like that sir andrew has once you put things in like a two-ton car and say don't worry about it the robot it'll take care of it and they're very careful to not call them robots right right actually the Audi's the head of Audis R&D lab Wolfgang der heimer said that we are not out to compete with the robot industry check that was a very interesting ways I've got this robot we built a check out this robot uh yeah it's gonna be many many years until they figure out exactly how this can or and they're all saying what this is this is decades away we're just we're putting stuff together Lexus like oh we're showing safety features it's just in the package of a self-driving car don't worry about it but there you know this is not anytime soon well and how does it ever get done because it seems to me that like the that's already happening right there's a little state in Los Nevada is one of them we're doing as it should be put its car on the road here right but again there are no laws here bring that car can also like drive to a brothel okay while drinking yeah like it doesn't matter what you do here that's why I love Las Vegas Russell I know what's your what's your sense on the legality of the situation I mean is there action around the states the federal level I think there's a way to work it out but I also think the concern is the reason I would want to buy a self-driving cars so I wouldn't have to drive and I wouldn't have to like pay attention so I I think the concern is you get by the time you make a product it's been so sort of pared back to deal with the legal things that people don't actually want to buy it I guess I mean I was on about or two and I think I think the answer for the industry is to say look this will make the roads actually safer yeah and they've got to get there they've got to prove to people that highways full of self-driving cars will be safer than like my distracted casual listening right but they also have to somehow remove all liability from themselves or else they're never gonna want to play the game right because if I'm as long as I'm able to blame Lexus hang on a death lexus is gonna yeah we're all we're going down no I really it's got to get mapped out but we'll see okay yeah all right so we have we have one more demo Russell thank you so much for for talking to us and I'm now kind of depressed about self-driving cars like they're awesome so I they do here I feel like I'm never gonna get one I'm only here at press thank you they'll go for that anytime um but so there's one more demo we have left and I feel like I've said this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life like 400 times this week yeah um but this might be the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life it's called the artifact and like let's just we have a video of it we've played with it a little bit so let's just start with that and we'll go from there hi this is Rondo from the verge and we're here with the art of fun instrument one and its inventor Mike Butera what this is is actually an advanced midi controller with an iphone 4 its brain if you know how to play guitar you can intuitively just start playing and it has the fret board down here with the strings and then you strum on this touchpad down here or you can finger pick it has five different modes guitar bass violin banjo and custom the cool thing about that is if you know how to play guitar you can have the guitar sound and that's cool but you can actually have it in guitar mode and then change the MIDI instrument to say a violin you can change it to an organ you can change it to a synthesizer but then play it like you're playing a guitar so because this is actually a midi controller it can work with Eddie anything that has a MIDI input so this works with GarageBand this works for pretty much anything and you can also play live with it you can record with it this can also use vocoder apps so it has a microphone input we're using for sensing technology on this for both the fingerboard and the strum section so all in all the instrument one is unlike anything i've ever played but at the same time exactly like everything I've ever played it's expected to be eight hundred dollars for pre-sale this spring and then other models on sale after that so this fell pretty squarely into the realm of things that we saw and we're like we have to try immediately yeah so we actually brought Mike Butera into the studio with us with the artifact is it's the instrument one is that the first system I mean it's easier to you have to see it in person it's made of wood feel like it's you too very good say African hardwood sustainably harvested and we make it in Nashville right and I mean it looks crazy yes sir Tillis let's start with kind of the back story of how you started the company and built this thing yeah sure so I have a PhD in sound studies and my dissertation was on the way we listen phenomenologically with technology right so I teach that and sociology and then I I'm a musician and I played multiple stringed instruments so I wanted to make a device that changed the way that we approached instruments that wasn't just a guitar then we have apps and so with MIDI you know all kinds of things but if you're limited to a screen you basically right you know the non tactile so this came about so you have it this is a touch sensor yeah these are force sensing resistors actually on the fret board and the strum section and so they they measure the the pressure and then translate that into various MIDI commands you can you can do effects by pressing harder you can do slides you can turn off the frets and go between you can do for brato so there's it's more expressive than then we yes so you've developed this to work or to be a huge number of instruments right it can think you were playing around it was a whole bunch of different things that you had it yes the ideas you can play it in she has mad skills a trick this is amazing like a guitar or a mandolin something like that but then you put it up right you can use it like a harp or a upright bass or cello if you put it on your shoulder right I can show you so we'll change the string mode and then this becomes like a bow right so you can run any app any iPhone app that takes midi this is just controller yeah that's right so you know we are programming the firmware and actually people can customize the firmware to make it whatever instrument they want interesting so we made this we made it this weird shape because it's organ Amin and its portal thing so you know it's you in all these different positions you have a reason even though it's it's an odd thing once you once you hold it like oh yeah so you're I mean this is part of the bigger story which is a lot indie hardware projects here yeah you're so nothing um yeah what's it like being an indie hardware developers especially for a project it seems it seems like you couldn't immediately explain this to someone well you could one as soon as you see it i think you get it but we've been doing this for two years and we kept a client for almost that long we were just unveiled you know basically today and so um we've gotten local angel funding in Nashville I mean Nationals an amazing city for this not only because the tech scene but music scene and all that so we've been able to get by and with a great team of engineers I mean these guys have built consoles like they're veterans of the industry and so we we just love the project and that got us here now to go farther than that I mean a lot of people do the kick start doing the yoga thing where we're kind of going a middle ground of we want to get investors who care about the field because we're doing domestic production we're not just shipping off to China and looking at the bottom line this is this is about caring about the not only the production process but then when people hold it like right well you're caring about your instrument right yeah it's you'd like love and the funny thing is by including your phone which you know all these psychology studies saying people actually have loved type emotions with their gadgets you know this we're kind of bridging that yeah divide well so that's I was actually gonna ask that so it's um we've seen a lot of digital instruments like that's kind of anything for a while but they're all sort of they're all very much keep this away toys right and in this oh my goodness yes but this feels way more like an instrument like one thing on purpose did you're just gonna do this is amazing what you're very sound getting trolled by an electric banjo no it's great that's great that's good thank you our music yeah we're all very proud of you I'm sorry so I mean this feels much more like real a measurement then just a toy for your iphone so you can play guitar yeah and that's I mean that's the big difference between you know a lot of the guitar hero type guitar controllers and and this is what we were making this for professional musicians I mean from keyboardists who want to get out behind the keyboards to string players who want to expand their sounds to people who want to practice or write song right in multitrack recording on the bus you know there's a lot of a lot of uses and it connects I mean the connects with all your standard music gear so are you finding that people want to make music using iphone as a central controller we've been doing a lot of customer development in nashville and and elsewhere to figure out what people want like that would matter to them and we've actually changed the design and continue to based on that feedback a lot of musicians are saying that you know how does this fit you got the omnichord that old sort of weird instrument then you have weird you know Qatar's or since guitars yeah and some people use an omni chord as a almost Kitsch thing now and people don't generally use other since guitars but by making it something that sort of fits your life a little better that you can actually carry around that you can put your phone in theirs it's more blended in in that sense so we you know that's what people are grabbing on to they they see it they want it and then they're like oh yeah and it would be useful in this and this and this space so Studios wanted just we met with a lot of students in Nashville you and they're like hey you know we just went this laying around cuz at you know eight hours into a session when you're just out of ideas you pick this up and you just mess yeah you can see what happened so can you can you play us a suite down right here yeah what do you want to cuz i've been trying um you're doing great okay you're learning so fat I think yeah so that yeah you're very see you just fire me I say nice things to you jack that's awesome can I have one yeah say hi to sauce yeah haha that's supposed to work all right Mike thank you so much ah that's awesome that is our show we this is our last day in the studio sadly they're taking all of this away from us but we still have more coming we have diverged mobile show coming up today at five we have a virg cast at six and our last webcast at CES is always really fun yeah so you should definitely hang out for that there will probably be more tired Neal I just more tired everybody else which is just amazing but so stick around we have a ton of great video content will be around all night and thanks so much for watching Mike we met me play us out yeah yeah you have drums you got drums drum solo two out all right this is the best rooms all right all right all right thank you guys so much bye everybody bye everybody happy CS you