CES 2015: The gadgets catching the eye in Las Vegas

SMARTGLASSES are letting shooters fire live rounds of ammunition without having to look directly through the site.

SMARTGLASSES are letting shooters fire live rounds of ammunition without having to even look directly through the sites of a gun.

The technology was on show last night at yet another gadget evening market at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2015) in Las Vegas.

By day, thousands of vendors including some of the biggest names in electronics show off their wares at three wings of the Las Vegas Convention Centre, and at one of the huge convention centres attached to hotels around town.

At night there’s the opportunity for start-ups to talk directly to journalists at lavishly catered events — CES Unveiled (Sunday), Pepcom (Monday), and last night at ShowStoppers.

This year, there’s one word mainly missing from CES lexicon — the t-word tablet. While there’s plenty of evidence of participants including journalists using tablet computers here, there’s not a lot of promotion of new tablets. They seem now mature tech.

At ShowStoppers last night, TrackingPoint, a company we covered at CES previously, showed off a new $US50,000 Wi-Fi connected gun that transmits what it sees through its sites to a set of Recon Jet smart glasses nearby.

The shooter doesn’t have to look through the site directly and can be operating the gun nearby from a safer location. This might suit, say, a hunter who does not want to be exposed to an animal, TrackingPoint said.

TrackingPoint said its new weapon would let anybody — even a novice shooter — hit an 18-inch target at a mile (1.6km). The gun has the ability not to fire if it detects you are not properly locked on to the target.

A shooter can contact a friend and share the vision through their barrel across the internet.

Another start-up Solowheel, showed off a $US995 indoor travelling device called Hovertrax that lets you glide around offices and other indoor settings at up to 8km/hr. It’s battery operated, takes 45 minutes to charge, and a single charge will give you a travel range of around 12km.

This reporter tried out the Hovertrax and it glides along in the ilk of the famous fictitious hoverboard found in the movie ”Back to the Future”, but of course has wheels. After about 5 minutes I was starting to get the hang of it, but you’d need a few hours to really get up to speed.

The Hovertrax has 3 accelerometers and gyro sensors to aid balance, and came to market just one month ago. The company already has a larger and even more expensive device for outdoor use. A short video of the Hovertrax is on our website.

Other tech on show included a Wi-Fi-connected sprinkler system called Blossom that uses a combination of downloaded weather reports and your schedule to decide when to activate your sprinkler system. You attach your hoses to the device which communicates with your home internet using Wi-Fi.

There are several autonomous drones at the show that can be programmed to simply fly around you from on high and take video. They offer extreme sportspeople a new perspective on their activities. So you can have video of yourself surfing or even parasailing from on high. “Hexo+” was one of those on show last night.

AirDog — which is designed to work in parallel with the GoPro camera — is another on display here at CES.

A Wi-Fi video doorbell called Ring will let you see vision of anyone at your front door from afar and you can even chat to them from across the internet. It costs $US199.

The popular internet service “Plex”, which catalogues and presents your home media in a visually attractive way, was displaying new technology that automatically catalogues your digital music collection even if it lacks metadata. It uses an algorithm similar to that found in apps such as Shazam to recognise tunes from digital audio directly and Plex is confident of the system’s accuracy.

Last night there were several companies promoting light bulb products that do much more. For example Sengled showed off three types of light bulbs designed for entertainment, utility and security.

One bulb also functions as a Wi-Fi repeater that soups up the strength of your home internet. Another called Snap is a light bulb with a tiny 1080p camera, speaker, microphone and infra-red detection that doubles as a secret security camera.

Chris Griffith travelled to CES in Las Vegas courtesy of Acer, Sony and Samsung.