2. CES & Our View of 2017
Technology is now essential to our daily lives. Accessibility and empowerment
has transformed how we connect and communicate. This has led to new forms of
user interaction that will usher in the business models of the future.
CES 2017 showcases the tools and technology that will further empower
consumers through new types of conversational experiences, the continued
evolution of artificial intelligence as well as the rapid rise of third-party ecosystems
supporting virtual, augmented and mixed reality.
The trends we covered at CES 2017 outline the evolution of marketing in 2017
through the consumer centric filters of connection, cognition and immersion.
• Connection – Trends that reimagine how we connect, enable and empower
consumers
• Cognition – Trends where machine based intelligence will disrupt and
redefine data assets and how we work
• Immersion – Trends that align technology and presence to evoke emotion,
entertain and power commerce
How we consume and interact via digital channels is about to be absorbed and
redefined. The technology featured at CES 2017 aligns with our view of the
coming convergence toward an ambient computing future built on new data types
that will simplify complex tasks and predict need states vs. reacting.
Tom Edwards
Chief Digital Officer, Agency
2
3. Cognition
Connection Immersion
Zone of
Convergence
CENTAUR-AI
MACHINE LEARNING AS A SERVICE
PERVASIVE VOICE-BASED EXPERIENCES
BLOCKCHAIN + AI
AFFECTIVE DATASETS
SEARCH TO 1:1 PREDICTIONS
SIMPLIFIED CONVERSATIONAL EXPERIENCES
E-SPORTS
HOLOGRAPHIC COMPUTING
CONNECTED CARS
SOCIAL VR
VR COMMERCE
(RE) MIXED REALITY
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF VR
CONNECTED PRODUCTS
6. Connected Product
Ecosystems
During the LG keynote executives announced 100% of their home
appliances released in 2017 will be advanced wifi capable. This is the
first time a megabrand such as LG has connected an entire line of
their products, and others are sure to follow.
Paired with the LG Hub Robot, these appliances can employ their own
data and cloud services with the power of a central control center that
minds the environment while deploying independent devices based on
environmental cues, user preferences, and cloud data.
Implications: This marks the beginning of an era where connected
products integrate into branded smart ecosystems that become more
than the sum of their parts. We're likely to see multiple brands fight for
dominance in this space creating their own closed systems.
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Connection!
LG's Hub robot controls several of LG's Smart home appliances like their
smart oven and washing machine. It runs also runs Amazon's Alexa.
Previous: LG announces that their entire suite of home appliances will be
100% advanced wifi capable, creating an entire ecosystem of connected
products.
8. Alexa: The Interface for IoT
Alexa was the undisputed winner of CES this year. Hundreds of
devices announced Alexa compatibility or complete Alexa integration.
Everything from smart humidifiers, refrigerators, ovens, vacuums,
lights, switches, TVs, and oh yes, cars.
The huge volume of devices that announced compatibility shows a
sharp turn from the trend of pushing independent mobile apps for IoT
devices. The appeal of a single, voice activated interface that can
manage all the smart devices in a home may influence consumers to
look for devices that are designed to work with Alexa.
Implications: Voice Interfaces are quickly becoming the remote
control for the Internet of Things and Amazon stands firmly at the head
of the pack.
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Connection!
VW's Alexa integration can give status updates, help with location assist,
create reminders, and purchase items and parts for their specific model VW,
while LG's smartfridge (previous) will include all standard Alexa functions
along with direct ordering from Amazon Pantry.
10. Secure Connected Home
A number of companies including Norton, BitDefender, McAffee
introduced home network security routers aimed at protecting your
personal devices and IoT systems from external threats. With an
estimated 50 Billion IoT devices to be connected by 2020, a strong
security solution is a necessity. With botnets like Mirai using unsecured
IoT devices to wage DDoS attacks on major websites and individuals
alike, the security of IoT is more important than ever.
Implications: Stories of hacked baby cams and even a Jeep have
caused concern over the safety of IoT devices. A solution to secure
home networks and eliminate these threats is likely to increase
confidence and result in greater adoption of IoT and smart home
technology.
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New routers from Bitdefender (previous) and Norton (above) promise to keep
home networks and IoT devices safe from external threats including phishing
websites and hacking attempts.
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12. Projected Screens
Light-based screens projected onto various surfaces were found in a
forms at CES. These projectors allow nearly any surface to become a
screen, with many incorporating motion sensitive cameras that can
emulate the feel and interactivity of a touch screen.
While touch-responsive projected screens aren't new at CES, the size,
variety, responsiveness, and cost provide a welcome upgrade from
previous generations and makes them far more appealing for multiple
use cases.
Implications: We're likely to see a proliferation of screen "form
factors" in everything from consumer devices to in-store retail
experiences. The ability to turn any surface into a screen provides
incredible flexibility and endless possibilities for interactive content.
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The Beam Lab light bulb projector (previous) allows consumers to add a
projector to their home without the need for a dedicated device.
Sony's Xperia projector turns any surface into an interactive touch screen
using a motion sensing camera to understand movement and gestures. 8
14. Body & Mind as an
Interface
From high-fidelity mapping and gesture tracking for virtual reality to
EEG devices that monitor brain waves from inches away, there were
several demonstrations of technology using the body and mind to
control digital experiences.
Implications: As more and more technologies begin to use the body
and mind as an interface, digital experiences will become more
immersive. These interfaces will also allow digital and virtual
experiences to be far more mobile and universally accessible. In the
long term they may lead to a decline in the use of traditional input
methods like the mouse and keyboard.
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The SoftKinetic's platform (previous) showed high fidelity models of users' hands,
allowing extremely nuanced gestures and interactions with the environment.
Bodywave's EEG monitor actively measured driver's brainwaves to assess attention to
the road and stopped the car every time the user broke attention. This technology can be
used to help eliminate drowsy driving. 8
16. Movement as a
Platform
Sensors that track body position, velocity, force, traction, and other
various states of movement were found in devices designed to go
beyond measuring the body's state. These devices provide the user
feedback necessary to understand and modify their technique, and
even compare their movement and positioning with masters of their
craft.
Implications: This combination of sensors, cloud services, and
instruction will allow people to learn skills and movements like dancing,
martial arts, or even a golf swing with the accuracy that typically
requires in-person instruction. This can provide brands with
tremendous opportunity to expand their offerings in highly experiential
and engaging ways.
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Evalu measures minute changes in pressure, force, height, and velocity to track nuanced
movement that can be used to coach proper form and mechanics.
Atomic Bands (previous) captures movement of dancers and martial artists to teach users
the style and moves of experienced practitioners.
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19. Pervasive Cognition
This year the halls of CES featured hundreds of devices that
embed or provide data to an artificially intelligent voice
assistant platform, like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, or even one of
the new entrants like Baidu, Google, or Mattel.
While it's exciting to see electronics imbued with even a
limited form of "smarts" and automating worthwhile tasks, the
real peak into the future of AI assistants came in the form of
emotive robotics - assistants like Lynx and Jibo that recognize
human emotion through facial recognition and respond
accordingly.
Implications: In a single year we've shifted paradigms from
"everything will be connected" to "everything will be cognified."
As more sensors become commercially available and AI
assistants improve we'll see the automation of increasingly
complex tasks and the development of engaging robot
personalities that will begin to resemble elements of what
we've seen in science fiction movies. It will happen sooner
than you think.
1917
Score:
Autonomous lawnmowers incorporate machine vision, sensors, and cloud-based AI to
understand the surrounding environment and adapt to changes over time.
Lynx robot (previous) is an Alexa enabled AI robot that can dance, play music, do yoga
and uses facial recognition to acknowledge emotion.
20. 20
AI Becomes a Service !Cameras to Eyes!
Emergence of General
AI Assistants !
Search to 1:1 Answers !7. Contextual Assistants Arrive !
8. Contextual Assistants!
21. Contextual Assistants
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As Amazon, Google, and Siri compete for dominance across mobile
devices and IoT, several AI powered contextual assistants made an
appearance at the show. From the cooking assistant Hello Egg which
plays recipe videos and assists with cooking tasks, to Mattel's Aristotle
which includes Cortana along with a separate, kid friendly AI to read
them stories and play games. Expect even more contextually focused
and function-specific assistants to appear throughout the year.
Implications: Amazon's Alexa may be dominating the voice assistant
landscape, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for other assistants
purpose-specific form factors and AIs. Adding features like cameras,
screens task-enhanced AI can provide additional functionality or
context specific capability that the leading platforms can't.
Mattel's Aristotle can identify when babies wake and soothe them back to sleep. It can
also sing to them and teach the ABC's.
Hello Egg (previous) is a cooking assistant for the kitchen. It can help users plan their
meals for the week, organizes their grovery list and order produce.
23. Object Recognition
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iDentifi uses convolutional neural networks to identify patterns and objects. It's available
in 25 languages and oh, it was written by a sixteen year old.
Poly (previous) also uses AI to identify objects in extremely complex situations with
almost no latency because most of the image library is stored on the device.
Object recognition isn't anything new, (Google released
Goggles in 2010), however the technology on display this year
was recognizing objects in far more complex scenarios and
with greater detail and speed than we'd ever seen before.
Interestingly enough, the versions that were most impressive
were born from assistive technologies meant to help the blind
and are capable of identifying a dizzying array of objects and
all sorts of variations thereof.
Implications: In order for Augmented Reality to deliver on its
hype, devices will have to speedily identify billions of objects in
all sorts of conditions and understand context. The examples
seen on the show floor are likely to be the brains of the
augmented reality headsets and devices of the near future.
25. AI in the Cabin
While most of the news around autonomous cars has focused on how
they understand the roadway, several new technologies are bringing
the focus inside the car and to the driver.
From reading lips to reading emotions, machine vision and artificial
intelligence are being used to assist drivers in getting to their
destination, while monitoring and even impacting the emotional state of
the driver.
Implications: As AI begins to influence ever more elements of driving
and transportation, it will radically transform the concept of what it
means to drive a car. While we're years away from fully autonomous
cars, we're entering a transition periods that will begin to train some of
the behaviors we'll take with us into the autonomous future. Pay
careful attention to these as they'll likely signal the changes in media
consumption in the years ahead.
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Toyota's Concept-I Emotion Map uses facial recognition to log the driver's emotions and
recommends routes that provide the most pleasant experience.
Nvidia's AI Co-Pilot (previous) uses lip reading to detect commands from the driver and
gaze detection to understand when they are distracted from the road.
27. Autonomous
Everything
While the world waits for autonomous cars to become commonplace,
the revolution in autonomous vehicles is quietly happening with
drones, personal mobility devices, and delivery vehicles. The show
floor had everything from autonomous drones that navigated complex
terrain without an external signal, to super-high-tech self-balancing,
multi-axis unicycles from Honda.
Implications: Autonomous vehicles are going to have a greater
impact on our lives than the concept of autonomous cars alone. They'll
create new opportunities for delivery, shipping, logistics, personal
mobility, that we're never possible before. This evolution will
dramatically impact industries that rely on shipping or just-in-time
delivery of parts and supplies. These vehicles will also begin to shape
our expectations around delivery and transport in the same way on-
demand digital services have over the past few years.
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The Local Delivery Robot can deliver items 5-30 minutes from a central hub and is much
cheaper than traditional last-mile delivery methods.
Honda's Uni-Cub is a self-balancing, autonomous, personal mobility device.
30. Full Sensory
Immersion
Devices that convey various sensations of touch and smell added
further depth to the immersive worlds of VR. Haptic feedback
simulated variations in texture and pressure while robust 3D Inside-Out
tracking allowed users to see and use their hands in virtual
environments, an element sorely lacking from most VR experiences
today.
Implications: The addition of sensory stimulation will provide
increasing depth within VR experiences. As these peripherals gain
traction and increase in resolution and fidelity we'll be seeing
experiences that are extraordinarily realistic and fool more than just the
eyes and ears. This will also more realistic representations of products
within VR, making the idea of shopping in VR more appealing than it is
today.
30
Score:
This Haptic feedback device allows users to feel various textures and pressure as they
interact with the items in a virtual world.
The Taclim shoes (previous) mimic different terrain such as wood, wet grass, snow and
sand.
32. VR: Spatial Freedom
Multiple booths were dedicated to solving of VR's lack of spatial
freedom. With high-end VR currently requiring a cumbersome wire and
mobile headsets dependent on stationary operation, the experience of
space and mobility has been a challenge for the industry.
Various mobile Vive and Oculus form factors allowed users to ditch the
wire and move freely about a confined play space. Meanwhile Zeiss
presented a solution for mobile headsets that allows six degrees of
freedom, adding the ability to crouch, jump, and move forward and
backwards to mobile headsets through inside-out tracking.
Implications: While initial impressions of VR tend to wow, significant
experience with the device leaves players with a sense of restriction
rather than infinite possibility. These enhancements to VR's capability
will ensure even more immersive experiences that enable new modes
of interaction and ultimately, impact adoption and scale of the devices.
32
Score:
Zeiss VR One enables players to move on all axis in mobile VR by using the device's
camera to understand the players relationship with space around them.
Wireless adapters like Display Link (previous) allow players to engage in VR games without
the need to worry about tripping over wires.
34. Augmented Reality
Audio
Screens and headsets may get all the attention, but audio proved to be
one of the most promising and capable media at the convention.
Various headsets and ear buds incorporated smart filtering to allow
users to selectively focus on or enhance certain sounds in their
environment like speech or filter out sounds like sirens, and office
chatter.
Other capabilities included directional audio that played through a
smart device replicating many of the capabilities or Augmented Reality
headset like directions or restaurant information through the use of
voice and audio.
Implications: What we're witnessing is the viability of audio as a
computing platform. With brands like Sony, Apple and Doppler labs
creating experiences for the ears, we won't be confined to a series of
screens to get data that might be better served through audio and can
free our attention toward the environment around us.
34
Score:
Here One from Doppler labs can isolate and cancel specific sounds or enhance others.
For example, cancelling airplane noise, but amplifying speech nearby.
Sony's Project N (previous) delivers private listening and AR audio experiences that layer
over the sounds of the world around you without the need for a screen.
36. Alternative Interfaces
Mature
Eye tracking and gesture detection have been around for years, but
the processing power to leverage them for robust and complex
interactions wasn't present in the right form factors. Now, eye and
gesture tracking is feasible at a incredibly high definition, allowing
for more natural and intuitive interfaces and more immersive
interactions.
Implications: Although early prototypes fell far short of their hype
and dampened enthusiasm, new incarnations of the technologies
show incredible promise and will certainly impact the way we
interact with our devices, allowing content providers to create novel
experiences with new modes of interaction.
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MSI and Alienware laptops have incorporated Tobii eyetracking into their monitors to allow
gamers to use their eyes to aim and direct the camera.
Usens' Impression.Pi (previous) brings hand and gesture tracking to the mobile VR
experiences.
39. Car-based Commerce
Over the past decade, each new digital platform has incorporated e-
commerce in some way, and as cars become increasingly digital they
will be no exception.
With the assistance of blockchain everything from paying from parking
and buying gas, to car sharing will be enabled by smart contracts that
are initiated on the blockchain. Owners of autonomous vehicles will
even be able to receive package deliveries via their cars by giving
vendors authenticated access to their trunk, verifying the authenticity
of the package, and keeping the rest of the car off limits.
Implications: Transacting through a car on the block chain will provide
the necessary elements for autonomous cars to join car sharing fleets,
and allow leasing and financing models to be based on driving
variables such as milage, wear and tear, and others. This technology
will dramatically change the way own and share vehicles, while
creating ever more frictionless options for mobility and delivery.
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An eWallet concept from ZF, UBS and Innogy will provide cars the ability to pary for parking
and tolls, manage autonomous package delivery, and enable smart car sharing.
41. Cars as Health Platforms
Nearly every major car manufacturer addressed the element of health
and well being this year as it relates to driving and transportation.
Facial recognition helped determine driver's emotional state, while the
car responded by changing the environment in the cabin to enhance
alertness, a state of calm, or by recommending certain routes the
system knows will produce the most enjoyable ride for the driver.
Implications: As we move towards a future with ever greater options
in automobiles, from personal mobility devices, to fully autonomous
cars and beyond, the idea of what constitutes a luxury car will
ultimately change. While the focus is the act of driving today,
tomorrow’s most favored brand will be delivering experiences that are
the most responsive to those inside the cabin while moving from point
A to B.
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Toyota's Concept-I experience drove passengers through a virtual environment while
plotting their emotions to a map by using facial recognition tracking.
Hyundai's Mobile Health concept attempts to impact driver mood by mixing scent and
temperature to generate appropriate shifts alertness or calm.
42. Closing Statement
As another CES closes and the excitement and energy of the digital
utopian vision on display in Vegas crystalizes in the rearview mirror,
the sheer enormity of what just happened begins to settle in.
Within a single year we’ve gone from a theme “everything will be
connected” to “everything will be cognified” and we’re beginning to
see the first consumer experiences in ambient computing, where
the idea of an “internet” or “digital” fades to the background and the
focus is less about individual devices or even ecosystems and more
about the momentary experience of the consumer.
One thing is certain: just as quickly as the concept of “digital”
disrupted what it meant to create ads, and mobile uncoupled
context from circumstance, the convergence of Connection,
Cognition, and Immersion is rapidly changing what it means to
create an experience in a way that dwarfs what we’ve seen in
previous years. “Digital” isn’t about channels or engagements that
live behind a glass screen anymore. We’re moving to a place where
the word “experience” carries more weight and nuance than ever
before and we have an ever growing set of tools an canvases on
which to paint.
Ian Beacraft
VP, Digital Strategy 42
