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

Digital Trends CES Asia 2016
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?

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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