World's biggest tech show highlights a fantastic & not so cheap future

Each January tens of thousands of people descend on Las Vegas, Nevada, the mecca of wanton consumption and poster child of late capitalism, for a glimpse at the future at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Or rather, for a look at what they'll soon be able to buy.

Some of the products and services on show will go on sale as CES is under way, or soon after, and offer convincing and cost-effective solutions to existing consumer woes. Others are little more than prototypes seeking validation (and, in some instances, funding) and will never see the light of day beyond the labyrinthine expo halls.

That's because like the sales reps, developers, designers, product managers, executives, PR representatives, vloggers, editors and journalists who attend, CES understands that the future is in parts fantastic and in others, pure fantasy.

Here are some of the highlights of this year's show:

THE ESKOM-POWERED 'VISION' CAR

Once a curiosity of CES, automotive technology is now a mainstay of the event, with an entire hall dedicated to it. Concept cars tend to be fun. Because they never actually have to make it to the streets, designers can run wild, not just with the exteriors — dropping usually necessary items like wing mirrors and windscreens at will — but with what they imagine the interiors might offer.

Audi, for instance, showed off its AI:ME concept that tries to predict its driver's preferences and respond accordingly. Need to calm down? It'll spritz the cockpit with an aroma therapeutic fragrance. Craving a pizza from your favourite eatery on the drive home from work? Order one with a meaningful glance at the centre console.

Across the hall, Cadence Sound used a beach buggy and enormous cruiser motorbike to show off its rugged and waterproof bright-orange speaker gear for quadbikes and boats. Practical, indeed.

Meanwhile, the attention-grabbing Mercedes-Benz Vision AVTR will almost certainly never see a highway.

It's a curve-covered, iridescent and wholly recyclable car inspired by the James Cameron blockbuster, Avatar, presumably because the Na'vi of the film are environmentally conscious, just like the German automaker aspires to be.

Sony's S-Vision will never make it to your garage either. It's really a showcase for the Japanese electronics giant's sensors and other technology it hopes to sell to car companies as they seek to build semi-autonomous and entirely self-driving cars.

Then there's the FCA Airflow Vision, which takes the dimensions of a Land Rover but only puts in four seats, making it the ideal people carrier for a foursome of rugby props.

Nissan's Ariya Concept is actually a production car, for added confusion, and the all-electric Fisker Ocean doesn't run on air but, well, on electricity, hydro-electrically generated or otherwise.

One of the highlights, though, was Damon Motorcycle's very real Hypersport, a two-wheeler that uses a combination of sensors, cameras and screens alongside haptic feedback in the handlebars and LEDs in the windscreen to alert its rider to imminent perils.

The Hypersport can also switch from an upright riding position to the more jockey-like racing one common to superbikes at the press of a button. It'll go on sale later this year in the US with a starting price of $25,000 (about R360,000) — no one said the future was going to be cheap.

EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE 8K

This year, as in every year, the key trends were obvious. Chief among them was the rise of 8K televisions: TVs with four times the resolution of existing 4K TVs (those, in turn, offer four-fold the number of pixels found on the full-HD or 1080p TVs that preceded them).

Samsung's stand showed off its 8K, nearly bezel-less 8K TVs along with a far more zeitgeisty one, the rotating Sero, that lets the viewer choose between the traditional landscape or a rotated, portrait orientation of the display. Portrait is the preferred format for contemporary content on Instagram and Facebook Stories or Snapchat posts. It's also good for reading long bodies of text but I'm not sure I'm ready to consume books or newspapers on my TV. That may change soon.

Around the corner, at the LG stand, a human traffic jam was forming. It's 8K TV wave — a collection of 200 edgeless, curved displays arranged like a ribbon and displaying a looping video of cosmic explosions and other natural phenomena — had CES delegates reaching for their phones to create an inescapably inferior recording of the experience.

There are a few obvious problems with 8K TVs. First, they're expensive. Current versions cost upwards of R50,000. Then there's the issue of content.

As it stands, there's almost nothing actually created in 8K to watch on them, only the highest-specification computers can output at that resolution, even if there were, and no contemporary gaming consoles support it. Also, Samsung and LG are bickering over the finer details of what constitutes "true 8K".

Most South Africans have yet to adopt 4K, and who can blame them? Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video offer a questionable facsimile of 4K and demand huge swaths of data to do so, and DStv and Showmax are still serving their content in HD. The demonstration content on an 8K set looks remarkable, but it's going to be many years — and price cuts — before I'll consider one for the lounge.

FAUX FOOD AND FAUX PETS

Back in the main halls, Impossible, the company that alongside rival, Beyond Meat, has started a land grab in plant-based meat-like products in the US showed off its fake pork to much appreciative lip-smacking from the media.

At a press briefing called CES Unveiled the night before the show, a company called Yukai showed off a different sort of artificial animal product: a cat-like cushion with an animated tail but no features or limbs, designed to purr and coo and comfort those who want a pet but for whatever reason can't have one.

Segway, the maker of mall security guards' modus transportandi of choice, let anyone willing to sign a waiver ride its S-Pod — essentially, an armchair on wheels that reminded most attendees of the devices used to carry the dimwitted.

In the final impressive display of a solution looking for a problem, Samsung unveiled its Project Neon, a selection of life-sized, onscreen, artificial humans it envisions usurping the role of actual humans for tasks like hotel check-ins or information desks.

As I leave Las Vegas I think of how perfect a spot it is for a show like CES.

Both are unreal and ersatz and both are about throwing money at dreams, knowing only a fraction of them will ever become reality.