CES Preview 2022: Day 0 News Summary
News from Qualcomm, John Deere, NVIDIA, Canon, Hyundai, and tonight’s guests on Clubhouse: Fluent.ai and FluentPet.
To listen to the program live open the Clubhouse app on your phone, join the Silicon Valley Global News group, and it starts at 10pm PT Pacific Time from Las Vegas. Here is a link to listen:
https://www.clubhouse.com/room/PvndyqND
Article by Micah Blumberg (find info & links about me at http://vrma.io )
I’m at CES 2022 to learn about the latest in technology first hand. I’m there in person, onsite, to speak to the companies that are leading the world with new & innovative products. I’m also writing a book that is broadly about science & technology, and it’s specifically about neuroscience, brain computer interfaces (which I consider to include both traditional medical imaging technologies and newer “metaverse” related technologies like AR & VR), artificial intelligence, and artificial sentient labor. Given my interests I was surprised and delighted by what I have found at CES so far. The major topics that came up today at CES included autonomous cars, robots, well technically self driving vehicles are robots, and the rest was about the metaverse, augmented reality, and virtual reality.
What I saw at the media only event that excited me was a lot of attendees, a lot of people from the press made the trip out to CES this year, and the excitement was in the air. Before the show there was concern that people might now show up but I saw big numbers, and folks were very enthusiastic about going to each and every one of these press events. I felt that there was electricity in the air!
Also I’ve really appreciated the effort that CES, the Consumer Technology Association has gone to, to make sure that the conference was safe during this pandemic. Everyone was vaccinated, everyone was wearing a mask, and there was a lot of respectful social distancing. It was great. The talks had limitations on how many people could be in the room, and chairs you could see were separated by a reasonable distance to reduce the chances of spreading disease.
If you are like me and you want to know about the latest in artificial intelligence, drones, robotics, space technology, and self-driving cars (which are technically robotics, right?) then CES 2022 was absolutely the place to be.
Qualcomm
Qualcomm: I was able to field a couple of questions to the CEO of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon, during the Q&A session after his speech. I asked him two things. The first question was, will Qualcomm’s automotive program eventually integrate with a self-driving car autonomous vehicle program, and will Augmented Reality, via Microsoft Mesh, eventually be integrated into the program as well.
Qualcomm is engaged with programs with their customers for fully autonomous cars. Bringing Microsoft Mesh or Augmented Reality to the car is no longer a technology challenge, it’s a design & time challenge to create a product and scale it.
Watch his full answer here:
Nvidia
NVIDIA’s GTX OMNIVERSE is out of beta and generally available to 3D software creators. It’s free to individuals. What I zeroed in the NVIDIA presentation was a tiny fact about how NVIDIA believes that VR is going to grow 4 times in the next 4 years.
John Deere
John Deere announces an autonomous production ready self-driving tractor, based on NVIDIA’s technology stack.
I haven’t written a lot about agriculture technology, but this news from John Deere is special. On the surface it’s a story about self-driving vehicles, which as I mentioned are really robots, but deep down this is really a story about autonomous artificially intelligent labor. I think John Deere under estimates the magnitude of the importance of new product which utilizes Nvidia’s self-driving technology. I think artificial labor is going to cause a global boom in production, lowering the cost of food, ending world hunger, and increasing everyone’s purchasing power.
What they talked up was the value to farmers on the individual level, ie the value to their customers from a farmer’s perspective, in terms of you can set the tractor to run all day (you still have to refill the tractor), and farmer’s are going to be able to trust this thing, because it has anomaly detection software (deep neural networks) it’s ready to stop if a sign falls in the field or if something is there that shouldn’t be there, and it’s production ready, ready to run on it’s own, placing seeds at perfect distances from one another. Shipping later this year.
Canon
Canon showed the latest software and use cases for their dual fish eye lens. That includes using AI to recognize hand gestures.
Canon‘s’ Kokomo is a Virtual Reality platform. For Kokomo is software that lets you combine your Canon Camera, VR Headset, and Smart phone in a new way. My understanding is that it’s ideally used with the new Canon RF 5.2mm f/2.8L Dual Fisheye lens.
Canon also show their new AMLOS technology & web software & their collaboration with Joseph Gordon Levitt from Hit Record
Hyundai
Hyundai, today I was most impressed with the Hyundai News Conference at CES. It was so incredible to see the Boston Dynamics Robot Spot walk onto stage in real life and obey commands to follow the speaker on stage and then to leave the stage by itself after being dismissed.
Hyundai showed us new intelligent wheels that can move anything, tables, chairs, people, cars, houses, entire hospitals. They showed us a Grandmother entering a capsule from her apartment, that climbed down the building, into the street, into a larger vehicle. They showed us that in the future an entire hospital could be put into storage, shipped to a new location, and the robots will unfold and set up the hospital. Do you remember that China built a new hospital in the early days of the pandemic at record speed? This means that Hospitals could be built in advance and they can move to the site where they are needed on command.
Hyundai showed us that with its partnership with Boston Dynamics & Microsoft we can have a personal robot companion that will let us physically interact with the world remotely via the metaverse, like being able to send your hands to mars. They showed a video a dad and his little girl operating a robot on Mars, she touched the rock and the robot touched the rock in the same place and the little girl was able to feel what a rock on mars felt like.
This is like a science fiction film come to life.
FluentAI
I spoke to Fluent.ai’s CEO Probal Lala during the Clubhouse talk on July 4th that this document references.
Here are some key points about Fluent.ai that they shared with me. Paraphrased & partially quoted:
‘Fluent.ai is a speech technology company. They offer a range of AI voice interface software products to OEMs and service providers.
‘Their team has 9 years of research in machine learning, AI and multiple families of issued patents.
‘They can accurately act on commands from speech in a wide variety of languages using a new tech that is called speech to intent, rather than the old tech which is speech to text to intent (and then back to text to speech.)
‘They are saying that it’s faster, it works better in noisy devices and on edge devices.
‘They announced At CES 2022 a partnership with Knowles Corporation, a global provider of advanced micro-acoustic microphones, speakers, audio processing, and precision device solutions.
FluentPet (not related to Fluent.ai mentioned right above)
With FluentPet you can get text messages from your dog. That’s really the key fact that folks need to know. There are buttons, and networked computer system, you and your dog learn to communicate in new ways together. Right now the intent is for the dog to say press a button for water for example, and you might get a message on your phone, but in the future if the dog presses multiple buttons, such as the water & bone at the same time, that could mean the dog would like ice (this was actually reported by some of the customers of FluentPet).
To paraphrase & partially quote their announcement: ‘FluentPet is pioneering new possibilities for interspecies communication, they have announced the launch of FluentPet Connect: a WiFi-connected smart system for advancing communication and deepening connection between people and their animal companions.’
Wow!
‘Fluent Pet Connect arrives 18 months after the debut of the original FluentPet HexTile system, which has generated over $7 million in revenue since videos showing dogs learning to use FluentPet’s “talking” buttons went viral online.’
‘With upgraded design, audio, and overall functionality, FluentPet Connect represents the next phase in the company’s quest to bridge the interspecies communication gap.’
Thanks for reading and or listening to the broadcast.
Here is a link to the broadcast.
