Events – Mind. Blown.

The Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is a yearly expo held in Las Vegas where all manner of technology is shown to the world. CES has become mostly a marketing event for companies to show off their wares to journalist. Many of the devices and technologies shown will never make it to market, they are demos, prototypes, concepts, and gimmicks. Due to the nature of the event many companies angle for a viral reaction so devices can range from the bizarre to the impressive to the cute to the wildly useless.

CES blows my mind in several ways, the first is just the sheer size. The show hosts over 4500 companies across 11 venues totaling 2.9 million square feet of exhibition space. This means that no single person can hope to see even a fraction of the companies there. I have never gone and I am not sure it would ever make sense to go. Teams of journalists take on areas of their beat and try their best to cover it. This is the main fuel for viral coverage because journalists share their must-sees but is still the best way to know what was being shown.

The other way CES blows my mind is some of devices and technologies that are on display. Everything from eSports to food tech to automotive. Here are some highlights:

Wearable technology has been on an upward trend since the release of fitness trackers, smart watches, and wireless headphones. More smart watches seem to be moving away from trying to be a phone on your wrist and instead are meant for giving people health data using advanced sensors. Here are two examples. This is a smart move as there will be a trend away from notifications of all kind and the strongest use case for wearable tech is health and fitness. I personally also like to see a move of watches to longer battery life.

I mentioned that many concepts or prototypes are shown at the show and the Toyota Woven City is a great example. The idea of creating a city to be a lab for new technologies is not a new idea and other companies are trying to do the same thing. Still I like to see this kind of ambitious plan to see how disruptive technologies can work divorced from the momentum of our lives and society.

On the edge of improbable and interesting was this set of chef robotic arms from Samsung. Assistive technologies come in many forms and one area with still a ton of growth potential is direct physical tasks. It is one thing to ask a voice assistant how many tablespoons are in 1/8 of a cup but it is next level to ask a robot to chop the onions while you saute in a pan. I love to cook and devote a lot of my time to cooking but many people lack either the time, knowledge, and/or motivation to cook for themselves. With trends in the food space of moving away from processed foods and with the lack of success of meal prep deliveries the answer may be other assistive technologies like this one.

There were of course foldable phones, insane TVs, and the best example of the useless but viral device was the Charmin Rollbot. Don’t worry about how it would open the bathroom door or refill its roll, just realize that there are areas of life that don’t need just-in-time inventory.

What blew my mind this week was an event called AGDQ which stands for Awesome Games Done Quick. At this gaming event players come together to speedrun games for charity 24 hours a day for a week straight and it is all live streamed. Speedrunning is exactly what it sounds like, trying to complete a game as fast as possible. This event blows my mind in multiple ways.

First is that the events that this group runs generates 7 figures that goes to charity, this particular event is donating to the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Considering the age group of most of the participants (college age or younger) this is an impressive feat.

Second is that the games being played range from the obscure and old (what even is Razor Freestyle Scooter for the Nintendo 64?) to the beloved (Super Mario Bros. 3) to the new (Control).Third is what these players accomplish in these runs. Everything from 100% complete runs that can take hours (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is estimated at over 4 hours) to Any% runs that allow players to use any glitch, exploit, or strategy for the sake of speed to complete an entire game in under 20 minutes. While the run is going there is commentary about the actions the player(s) are completing which brings them from incomprehensible to accessible and exciting.

The last thing that blows my mind about this event is the culture around it. Each of these games has a sub-culture that has explored and mined the game for speed. Bending it to the player’s will, trying over and over and over to create strategies that shave milliseconds away. Muscle memory that is forged to complete seemingly impossible feats of dexterity. Players compete in races, showing off tricks and sequences that have inside jokes for names or are references to the player who first discovered them. It is like a fractal where you can zoom from speedrunning itself with its nomenclature, rules, inside jokes (kill/save the animals!) and tight schedule to a specific game with its best runners, tricks, and strategies and finally to a specific type of run within that game, 100%, Any%, etc. These can be changed by donation incentives that can make the players do strange glitches, higher difficulties, or even complete games blindfolded.

The result of this whole thing is people spending an incredible amount of time and effort to do a very specific feat that only a seemingly tiny amount of people can understand and it blows my mind.