Towing a fine line between consumer electronics and ornamentation, the DP-2 is exactly what I want trend-setting technology to look like. Designed quite unlike any wireless earphone you’ve seen or you’ll ever see, the DP-2 by Dotcom Creation comes in obsidian black, in an open loop. Wearing them may not feel intuitive at first, but they’re designed to stay on your ear and look incredible as they do.
In a world where we’ve got in-ear, on-ear, and around-ear style headphones, the DP-2 breaks the mold as it holds onto the earlobe in its signature fashion by twisting open and closed. Still in its conceptual stages, the DP-2 was showcased (albeit within glass casing) at CES Asia, alongside Dotcom’s other ventures, which include a coffee kiosk where a robotic arm brews, prepares and serves you your coffee!
At the beginning of every year, the Consumer Electronics Show is held in Las Vegas, and towards the middle of the year, its Asian counterpart is held in Shanghai. CES Asia found itself being held across five football stadium sized exhibition halls at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre and multiple ballrooms at the Kerry Hotel in Pudong, the urban half of Shanghai.
There’s a marked difference between the CES in Las Vegas and the CES in Shanghai, and most of it stems from the techno-cultural differences of the two halves of the world. While Facebook, Amazon, Google dominate the west, China shuns them, fostering and nurturing its own companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. This so-called dividing line isn’t as crisp as you’d expect, with technological advancements in both the east and west taking off at the same pace (AI, AR/VR, Drones, Self-Driving Cars, Robot Assistants are all found in abundance in both hemispheres), but… but there’s a distinct cultural difference between the two. Asia is much more receptive to robot assistants, for example, since Terminator’s Skynet never really made a cultural impact on the east as much as it did on the west (let’s also not forget recent Chinese government projects and the Black Mirror episode titled Nosedive). This results in quite a few differences between CES Vegas and CES Asia, resulting in unique flavors in both ‘cuisines’, but make no mistake, both pack a massive punch. CES Asia is every bit as chaotic as its western counterpart (if not more).
Below are a few interesting takeaways from what CES Asia had to offer this year. Some incredibly cool, others awkward, funny, and borderline creepy.
THE INCREDIBLE HALF OF CES ASIA
smart’s EQ vehicle was all about stealing thunder from the Mercedes Benz stall right next door. It did so with its rather intelligent looking family car that could communicate with you via a display panel where the car’s grill is supposed to be.
You can’t help but drool at Lenovo’s WINBOT, easily their most monstrous machine ever built with an Intel Core i9 7980XE ( 18 core 36 thread) processor, NVIDIA’s GTX TITAN X GPU, an impressive liquid cooling rig to keep this beast at working temperatures, and an absolutely to-die-for design complete with red LEDs and a transparent spherical housing.
XROUND’s XPUMP silently sat in a corner of CES, but everyone who walked past this unsuspecting stall pretty much had their minds blown away. A simple device that sits between your playback machine and dual-speaker-setup, the XPUMP can make your two speakers sound exactly like a home theater, as it restructures the sound in a way that makes a 2.0 layout seem like a 5.1 surround sound system. They say that technology that’s sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, and the XPUMP felt a lot like a miracle, with a sound transformation that was so extreme, I couldn’t believe my ears.
Laser robotic arm that can etch/cut/burn pieces of paper, plywood, plastic, or toast for you? Yes please!
ONO showcased their $99 printer technology that literally uses your smartphone to create prints. How does it do that, you ask?? The smartphone sits under a bed of resin, flashing black/white images and curing the resin to create your product. Read more here!
DSeeLabs showcased a holographic LED Fan display that involved multiple two-blade fans with LEDs on them. As the fans rotated, the lights formed images (thanks to persistence of vision) that looked like they were floating in mid-air, as the fans themselves disappeared from view. Much like those USB Fan Alarm Clocks, but bigger, badder, and better.
I admit, pretty old technology that’s been around for a while now, but it still doesn’t fail to amaze me, as a laser projects light onto a surface in the shape of a keyboard while a sensor can pretty accurately register which key you’re pressing simply by plotting which laser key your finger touches. Million dollar idea for an iPad case! (I call dibs)
Chinese company Shadow Creator is spearheading the AR movement in China, with the Action One, a Hololens-killer-of-sorts that projects AR elements in your vision that even react to your hand movements.
THE INCREDIBLY WEIRD HALF OF CES ASIA
Meet BINA48, a humanoid robot based off a real human. BINA48 is basically one of the first attempts to make humans immortal (if that’s what you can call it) by taking the thoughts and thought patterns of a real woman (named Bina) and inputting them into a humanoid robot, effectively allowing a Bina to stay alive long after the original Bina is gone. Interacting with the BINA48, however, is nothing like a real human, since she’s only the top half. But hey, she’s made an appearance on Liquid Science, a TV series currently available for streaming on Netflix.
As you walk across the room, you’re suddenly greeted by ominous music playing on this “smart piano” that not only plays on its own, but also comes with a screen that either lets you view sheet music as you play, or turns into a piano-based version of Guitar Hero as you frantically hammer at keys to score high points. Cool? I’d say so. Necessary? Now that’s debatable.
A robo-dog army? A bunch of weird looking robots dancing to pop music? That’s just your run-of-the-mill regular stuff in China. These are just two of the robot exhibits in a hall that was dedicated to robots and drones. It’s creepy and interesting watching some of these robots mimicking humans, trying to perform tasks, and getting rather frustrated as their microphones can’t pick up audio commands from people because of all the noise around them. As long as they don’t get too frustrated, I think our human race should be fine!
Speaking of frustrating, bone-conducting headphones still failed to impress at CES Asia. They’re still flimsy, treblish, barely audible, and come with more cons than pros, as companies still make the promise of incredible audio that plays ‘inside your head’ as your ears stay open to real-world sounds. Read more on it here.
“No Bass, No Good” said a skeptic as he walked away from the stall that was displaying earphones sporting bone-conduction technology at CES Asia 2018. Bone conduction earphones work without sitting inside your ear. Instead, they rest in front of your ear, on your temporal bone, right under your temples. The earphones don’t “play” the music, but rather, relay vibrations to the bone, sending them directly to your brain, rather than through your ear canal. Why would someone go through that headache, you say? Bone conduction technology is supposedly the next best thing for audio. It feeds sounds to the wearer without blocking their ears, which mean two things. A. You can hear everything around you just fine, so a bone-conduction earpiece would work wonders for say a jogger, who wants to listen to the music, but without blocking their ears, so they can hear if a cycle is approaching them from behind, or if there’s a car speeding towards them while they cross the road. Benefit B. is that since they don’t exercise your eardrums, bone-conduction tech is actually better for your ears, and can even be worn by people with eardrum-based hearing disabilities. That’s the rosy promise of bone-conducting tech, but its track record has been rather poor.
There were 3 companies at CES Asia this year displaying bone-conduction technology. The most popular being Aftershokz, a company that has gone from strength to strength, selling audio wearables, and even managed to land the CES Innovation Award for their latest offering, the Trekz Air. The other two were relatively smaller players. One, competing with Aftershokz, and another that managed to weave their bone-conducting earpieces into sunglasses, so you’ve got a nice pair of shades that play music to you while you cut out the sun’s glare and look cool while doing it.
I casually walked to the Aftershokz pop-up stall, seeing massive posters of a man wearing the Trekz Air, looking positively dapper and athletic at the same time. Below him was a display area with earphones for the public to try… So I slipped one on. I immediately connected the Trekz Air to my phone, playing music I was familiar with, so I had a proper point of reference. I couldn’t hear anything. All I could feel was the earphones buzzing against my temples. “Sir, the environment here is too loud, if you want to hear the music, you need to cover your ears to block out external sound”, said a helper. This, I believe is the biggest flaw of bone-conducting earphones. The promise is that bone-conduction tech is supposed to deliver sound directly to the audio canal without relying on the eardrum, and yet, it failed to do so because my eardrum was picking up external noise, which sort of defeats the purpose of the bone-conducting earphones. You’re supposed to hear the music ALONG WITH the noise, not have the music drowned out by it. I indulged the helper by plugging my ears with my fingers to listen to the music, and the quality was just about OK. The earphones sit rather loosely on your temples, so when they vibrate, you end up losing a major part of the low-end of the music, or the bass. That’s a heavy blow too, considering humans CRAVE bass. It’s the first sort of sounds we hear in the womb, as the mother’s heart beats, creating a bass-like thud that the baby picks up on and recognizes in the future. Listening to audio without bass is like drinking wine but not feeling the buzz. It was enough for me, and several others to put the earphones down, stating that the technology was good on paper, but didn’t match up in reality.
The problem with bone-conducting earphones is the way they’re built, to be honest. They’re made in a one-size-fits-all sort of format, as they sit on your ears, pressing rather loosely on your temples. These vibrating units tend to leak sound too, which mean that someone sitting right beside you on the subway can probably hear everything you’re listening to. These earphones need to be designed radically differently, in a way that allows them to press against your bone much more effectively than the current method. They also need to be able to stand up to external sounds, because no one wants to have to block their ears to hear the music. If the promise is that music and ambient noise (no matter how loud) can coexist, then it definitely must live up to that ideal. I decided to buy a pair of Aftershokz bone-conducting earphones myself back in 2015 and promptly sent them back the next day because they didn’t deliver on their promise. It’s a little disheartening to see that three years later, people are still walking away from the earphones saying “No Bass, No Good”… but that is probably the most accurate feedback ever.
