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Drone cages, smart cars, and unrelenting hordes in our CES Asia VR tour

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CES Asia may not be quite as overwhelming as its Las Vegas counterpart, but it’s still pretty crazy. There’s the same spectacle, the same gadgets, the same self-driving cars, the same drones — all the same technology, just catering to an Asian market. In this video, we’ll take a little VR tour, showing off some of the big trends.

You can’t have a consumer electronics show without cars, which have become a big source of technology in recent years, and a major part of every tech show. CES Asia featured a number of fascinating innovations, from Pioneer’s LIDAR display to self-driving cars, but BMW’s impressive new i8 goes beyond all of that. Engineers asked: Once this is a self-driving car platform, what else are we going to do? What is that experience like for drivers? What is it like if you’re the guy that owns a self-driving car?” To that end, the i8 supports car-sharing services, and even connects with your home. Imagine this: the smart car knows when you’re getting home, and it turns on the heating system for you, turns on all the lights, and all of a sudden your house is ready to go. Smart car, smartphone, smart home … pretty smart world, huh?

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CES Asia also showed off all sorts of drones: Little drones, big drones, toy drones, drones for business, drones for agriculture. I haven’t seen a product category explode like this since … well … since ever. You can’t throw a tennis ball without hitting a drone here.

One seemingly normal drone here is hiding a new technology. Well, its an old technology, but it’s the first time we’ve seen it in a drone. It’s an Intel RealSense camera, which lets this drone follow you. A lot of drones do follow mode, but this one will dodge obstacles. So it will go around trees, it will go around hedges — whatever it is — in order to follow you without colliding with anything else.

Jeremy Kaplan
As Editor in Chief, Jeremy Kaplan transformed Digital Trends from a niche publisher into one of the fastest growing…
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