I think most of the systems were closed but I didn't dive into the
specifics to find out.
There were a lot of one-off devices for singular purpose home and health
monitoring. Some took regular dumb devices and made them smart. For
instance, there was a 9Volt battery that would plug into any regular smoke
alarm to report status.
There were certainly devices that were impressive on their own, but I tried
to pay more attention to integrated systems. There were only a few systems
that had a wide array of sensors that worked in one system/app. Of course,
these were also the most closed, from what I could tell, and they tended to
communicate over the electrical network. However, I did see WiFi being
touted more widely.
As to the things connected, personal health obviously had a large
representation. But for the home, power was the most common thing to
monitor and control. There was also water usage monitoring, environment
(quality, indoor, outdoor, etc.) monitoring and control, life-safety,
lighting control, etc. For appliances, there seemed to be an alarming
number of coffee makers that were connected (does that show us how
important coffee has become to our society?)
Another highly displayed gadget was the light bulb. The light bulb is not
just a light bulb any longer. It is also a security camera, motion
detector, audio speaker, alarm system, smoke detector, and mood altering
device (lots of booths touting the last one). However, I did not see a
bulb that had all of those in one unit. I really wanted to go around with
a light spectrometer and see what the CRI was for all those different
bulbs. To my eye, they looked like controllable RGB LEDs with narrow
spectrum emissions and very poor CRI.
I tried to focus my time on imagers. I really liked some of the health
items: you could look up your nose, in your ears, between your teeth, etc.
There were more 360 deg. cameras than I could count. The big DSLR
companies were there but I could not find Samsung's cameras in their booth
or Pentax cameras in Ricoh's booth. And, like the phones and tablets,
there were numerous off-brand cameras. After discovering dozens of action
cameras for sale through Amazon, I expected to see more of them at CES but
there didn't seem to be as many as I had thought (that is, non-360 deg.
cameras). I would still like to find a action camera with more optics
choices.
Overall, I thought imaging, especially traditional cameras, had low
representation. Because there were so many accessories for the imagers in
mobile devices, perhaps consumer imaging is relegated to the mobile device
more and more. From telescopes to microscopes, it seems the mobile device
can do it all.
So it was just the specialty cameras that get their own body. I did see a
few cameras that could stand out on their own. I really thought the 960fps
Sony cameras were fund to play with. Having worked in high-speed imaging
in the past, it is sick to see what can be imaged with a camera for $1K
compared to what we had to spend to get that kind of video just 30 years
ago. However, I couldn't get any information on how to trigger them and
the fixed lens was really slow to respond to commands so not a scientific
device by any means.
On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 10:08 PM, FreeLists Mailing List Manager <
ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
.
Some of the first generation products have been "closed systems," that
require a central controller, often using data over the in home electrical
network. Did you see much of this, or does it look like products are moving
to WiFi and Bluetooth?
Regards
Craig.
