The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is one of the craziest places on Earth. For a week each January, nearly all of the event space in Las Vegas is filled with the latest tech. More than 175,000 people come to visit the CES show, and the 43 football fields worth of gadgets and gizmos on display there. Nearly every major tech manufacturer is there — but if you’re not a part of the industry, you may never see any of it.
To lift the curtain, we’ve recorded a few of our favorite spots with a 360-degree camera. This will give you a small but enlightening glimpse of the glory that is the Las Vegas Convention Center.
In our 360-degree walk through, we tour a number of booths — including Samsung, LG, and Ford — and discuss some of the products on display, as well as the larger trends going on at the show.
- Amazon’s Alexa: We talk about the rise of Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, which is popping up in everything from cars to washing machines. Amazon didn’t have a booth at CES, but its presence was felt from every corner of the convention center halls.
- Electric and self-driving cars: Electric cars still aren’t mainstream, but interest in them continues to heat up. Faraday Future, an EV startup, showed off its first car at CES, and we took a look. We also made our way to Ford’s booth to see its latest self-driving car tech.
- OLED and QLED: 4K TVs are now here, and affordable, but before you rush out to upgrade your 1080p TV, you may want to see what’s coming. We checked out the screen tech at LG’s booth Wallpaper TV at CES this year. Samsung’s answer is QLED, a new screen technology that uses “quantum dots” to produce similar improvements in contrast and color.
- 5G: Remember when 4G became a thing? Well, 5G is on the way. It’s still quite a few years off, but we’ll take you through some of the benefits of 5G at the Qualcomm booth, and tell you what it’s going to take to become reality.
- Home automation: Just as with televisions, LG and Samsung are battling it out to better automate your home. In our tours of both booths, we highlight a few of their most impressive new smart appliances and home automation products.
We hope you enjoy this mini tour. For more of our wall-to-wall CES coverage, check out our official CES page.
