It's easy to lose track of yourself in a city as busy as Las Vegas.
Between the iconic Strip, the historic downtown casinos and the
international trade shows, folks have a habit of waking up without a
solid sense of location. We understand, and we're here to help. It just
happens to be the second day of CES. Take a deep breath; take a careful
look at your surroundings; and see if any of the following five stories
sound familiar. If so, there's a good chance you've been doing the trade
show shuffle at the Las Vegas Convention Center. If not, well, then you
just got fed Engadget's top five stories of CES 2014, day two. Really,
it's win-win.It's not a real trade show until industry bigwigs take the
stage and run through the keynote formula. Sony CEO Kaz Hirai was
certainly up to the challenge, kicking off the morning by looking back
at Sony's successes and failures, chatting with Breaking Bad's Vince
Gilligan and Sony Pictures' Michael Lynton about the evolution of TV and
trumpeting the PlayStation 4's multimillion-unit sales figures. No
keynote is complete without announcements, however, and Sony had plenty.
In addition to proposing a Life Space UX projector that promises to
turn your home's walls into 4K displays, Kaz revealed two new cloud
services designed to stream television content and PlayStation games
over the internet, finally delivering on the company's 2012 Gaikai
acquisition.Palmer Luckey's virtual reality headset impressed us as a
low-resolution prototype. It blew our minds again when Oculus VR
upgraded it with an HD display. Now, the company has taken it a step
further, building yet another prototype with an even better screen, less
motion blur and positional-tracking technology. With the help of John
Carmack (the mind behind PC classics like Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein
3D), the company is creating virtual experiences that are more realistic
than ever. The latest headset, called the Crystal Cove Prototype, may
not be representative of what a final consumer model will look like, but
Oculus VR is clearly pushing the envelope in terms of virtual reality
hardware.
Thought you knew how to build a gaming PC? Think
again. Razer has traded in the desktop PC's usual configuration of
motherboards, PCI-E cards and RAM chips for a tower of modular pods,
each outfitted with a specific hardware component that can be swapped in
and out on the fly. The strange-looking computer tower is called
Project Christine,Chandelier and
it's Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan's attempt at making building your own
computer a simpler, more user-friendly affair. To the PC gamers that
habitually assemble their own rigs out of off-the-shelf parts, Christine
could seem like an unnecessary stroll into a walled garden, but newbies
wading into the category via Valve's Steam Machine initiative could
find Razer's latest project to be an accessible alternative.If you're
thinking of picking up a high-end hybrid, you may want to take a look at
Audi's CES offerings. Today the company revealed its Sport Quattro
Laserlight for the first time, a hybrid electric concept car with, you
guessed it, lasers headlights built in. These beams promise to shine
brightly across five football fields of darkness, and their casing is
nothing to laugh at either -- the vehicle boasts an impressive 700
horsepower electric and gas engine that can run 90 miles on a single
gallon. It's not too hard on the eyes,China tourist visa either.Looking
for a futuristic gadget? How about a real, functioning tricorder? The
Scanadu Scout is the culmination of big dreams, massive crowdfunding and
an X-prize competition to create one of Gene Roddenberry's fictional
scanning devices. This isn't Spock's clunky scanner,alkyd resin however;
it's a sleek, lightweight medical device that fits in the palm of your
hand. Backers will be able to check their vitals this March, but we're
just excited to see this piece of science fiction technology materialize
in the real world.
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