When walking through the Japanese exhibits at CES 2025, it was difficult to miss the huge black spherical drone aircraft HAGAMOSphere that was prominently positioned as if demanding the passerby’s respect. And respect it deserved, for this drone prototype was one of this year’s CES Innovation Award recipients recognized for outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology. HAGAMOSphere’s innovation is its distinct ability to move both horizontally and vertically without tilting the aircraft. If the HAGAMOSphere is outfitted with a suitable camera, jerky movements in captured drone footage could potentially be eliminated or mitigated. Continue reading CES: Spherical Drone Design Could Benefit Media Production

During CES this week, Sony demonstrated a proof-of-concept experience based on the popular HBO post-apocalyptic drama “The Last of Us.” We were dropped into a six-person pod of newly enlisted defenders and assigned to a hardened defender who needed new recruits to combat a serious surge of zombie assaults that she was convinced could be overcome with our assistance. Armed with LED-enabled shotgun-like devices and tracked flashlights to assist our leader in discovering the concealed attackers, our combat leader led us with sharp and direct commands as she guided us through the terrors of the attack. Continue reading CES: Sony Introduces Interactive Experience – ‘The Last of Us’

There’s a knotty problem present in every single available VR device, and it gives most people a headache or eyestrain when using the device long enough: the distance between your eyes and the displays remains the same no matter how far away an object appears to be. At CES 2025 in Las Vegas this week, Canadian spatial media company CubicSpace demonstrated a software mitigation to this issue, showing us images on a standard 3D display and a stock Meta Quest 3 device, with a before-and-after effect of native pipeline and via their software. Continue reading CES: CubicSpace Demos Solution to a Consistent VR Problem

Mastercard Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Raja Rajamannar is quite clear on his opinion of current marketing practices. “The strategies to get the right consumer insights are totally flawed,” he said. “Every single aspect of marketing has to be reinvented.” In a CES panel on “Revolutionizing Customer Engagement,” Rajamannar and Netflix Vice President of Consumer Products Josh Simon described their partnership efforts to create experiences that engage the fanbase. The discussion, led by influencer.com Chief Executive Ben Jeffries, first focused on why traditional marketing strategies are failing. Continue reading CES: Netflix and Mastercard Partner on ‘Experience’ Marketing

Billed as a conversation among CMOs, this CES panel — moderated by Consumer Technology Association VP of Marketing & Communications Melissa Harrison — drilled down into how major brands and advertising technology companies are integrating artificial intelligence into their pipelines and organizations. They agreed that, although this is still at the beginning stage and requires experimentation, those who are frozen and have not yet started engaging with AI will quickly be at a learning curve disadvantage. Still, panelists emphasized that AI will not replace human creativity. Continue reading CES: How Brands and Marketers Are Integrating AI, Creativity

In the never-ending smorgasbord of AI hype, “agents” represent practical and worthwhile potential. AI agents are autonomous AI programs that can understand some context and take action in that context. Agents can autonomously perform a task that involves mapping a goal to its context and parameters (even if they’re not explicitly laid out), process data across multiple formats and ontologies to understand the goal and work through the task, call multiple functions across multiple apps, and take some action to achieve the goal. Unfortunately, however, while many are talking about AI agents, few are promoting actual products at CES. Continue reading CES: Show Features a Surprisingly Small Number of AI Agents

During the “Speed, Customization, Innovation: AI in Gaming” panel during CES this week, game publishers and developers shared their latest insights regarding how they use generative AI tools. A prevailing question involved the impact of AI’s ability to generate pixels and video frames efficiently — especially in light of Nvidia’s keynote the prior evening announcing its new Blackwell RTX 50 Series GPUs’ enormous ability to do so. Other opinions shared during the panel included thoughts on whether AI is overhyped for gaming and wish lists for fixing the limitations of AI tools. Continue reading CES: Thoughts on the Benefits and Limitations of AI in Gaming

When it comes to gaming, Microsoft is not just about Xbox, the popular gaming console it introduced in 2001. Microsoft VP of Global Revenue & Business Planning Jonathan Stringfield wants brands to know that they can reach a broad ecosystem of gamers not just on its console but on mobile devices and PCs. “Consumers expect to be able to watch entertainment across platforms,” he said during a CES 2025 panel discussion. “That’s what we’re doing in the gaming space. And that’s a space that is exploding — not just in overall numbers but who those gamers are.” Continue reading CES: Microsoft Courts Brands for Its Three Gaming Platforms

During CES 2025 in Las Vegas this week, Meta Vice President and Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun had a compelling conversation with Wing Venture Capital Head of Research Rajeev Chand on the latest hot button topics in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Some of the conclusions were that AI agents will become ubiquitous — but not for 10 to 15 years, human intelligence means different things to different AI experts, and nuclear power remains the best and safest source for powering AI. And, for those looking for more of LeCun’s tweets, he said he no longer posts on X. Continue reading CES: AI Pioneer Yann LeCun on AI Agents, Human Intelligence

At CES on Monday, Comcast unveiled Universal Ads, an advertising platform aimed at being an “easy button” for small- and medium-sized businesses to buy ad time on traditional TV’s streaming businesses, with the goal of luring them away from social media and digital outlets. In addition to Comcast’s own NBCUniversal, additional partners include DirecTV, Fox Corporation, Paramount, Roku, TelevisaUnivision and Warner Bros. Discovery. CNBC Senior Media & Tech Correspondent Julia Boorstin moderated a panel with Comcast and some major partners who explained why they signed on to the new platform. Continue reading CES: Comcast Debuts Universal Ads, Inks Media Partnerships

German research organization Fraunhofer IIS has unveiled LC3plus Lossless, an audio codec that promises to streamline wireless audio transmission by introducing dynamic lossless capabilities to its established LC3plus technology. The new codec represents a complete solution for high-resolution wireless audio, automatically switching between lossless and lossy compression based on available bandwidth. This adaptive approach maintains perfect audio quality when possible while seamlessly falling back to high-quality compression when needed, all while preserving LC3plus’s core benefits of low latency and robust transmission. Continue reading CES: Fraunhofer Demonstrates Dynamic Lossless Audio Codec

The Eureka Park section at CES 2025 in Las Vegas is an exhibition area dedicated to thousands of startups and early-stage products from across the globe. Our reporting team visited the space organized specifically for Japanese startups and discovered a few that are developing innovative technologies that could potentially be applied to 3D computer graphics modeling, XR, and gaming. Among the standouts were Tokyo-based CalTa that developed the digital twin platform Trancity — and Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo’s exhibit of its ongoing Feel Tech system. Continue reading CES: Japanese Startups Showcase 3D Modeling, XR, Gaming

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang kicked off CES 2025 with a keynote that was filled with new product announcements and visionary demonstrations of how the company plans to advance the field of AI. The first product that Huang unveiled was the GeForce RTX 50 series of consumer graphics processing units (GPUs). The series is also called RTX Blackwell because it is based on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell microarchitecture design for next generation data center and gaming applications. To showcase RTX Blackwell’s prowess, Huang played an impressively photorealistic video sequence of rich imagery under contrasting light ranges — all rendered in real time. Continue reading CES: Nvidia Unveils New GeForce RTX 50, AI Video Rendering

In an era of tremendous innovation and an explosion of new lines of products, the creation of standards has never been so important. UL Standards & Engagement (ULSE) created its first standard in 1903 and now boasts a portfolio of 1,700 standards; other standards-setting bodies include the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA). Moderated by ULSE Director of Insights Sayon Deb, a CES panel of experts underscored the critical importance of such standards for developing and marketing innovative products. According to Deb, 60 percent of consumers express greater confidence in certified products. Continue reading CES: Standards Are Increasingly Vital for Fostering Innovation

In the conference track of CES this year is a lineup of talks and panels on gaming and esports. During the “Generational Shifts: The Evolution of Gaming” panel, moderated by Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Senior Manager of Market Research Steven Hummel, industry executives and thought leaders shared their views on market trends emerging post-pandemic and how those trends are driving gaming across other media. While it is not surprising to hear that the average age of gamers tends to skew younger these days, perhaps the bigger takeaway is that gaming has become the new social media for many. Continue reading CES: Gaming Is the New Social Media for Young Generations