The CEDIA Tech Council was all over CES 2019 in Las Vegas, and CEDIA’s Walt Zerbe hosted a daily podcast from the show. Here’s part two of our series of takeaways
from those podcasts.
Reserve more wall space for bigger TVs, and yes, they’ll be 8K. 8K is coming just in time, according to Gordon van Zuiden owner of an integration firm called cyberManor (Los Gatos, CA). “The logic
behind it is that the average size of the televisions sold in the United States this year is around 47, 48 inches,” notes van Zuiden. “That's compared to about eight years ago when it was 36 inches and that's moving up quickly to a 50 to 55-inch
average size. When TVs get to be that size, 8K makes a lot of sense.”
A greater number – and variety – of sensors will appear in the home. As more and more devices are introduced in the home to monitor everything
from our gestures for control interfaces to our health, sensors will become more numerous. Peter Aylett (pictured above) of the firm Archimedia (Dubai, UAE) notes that one firm on the CES floor, Korea’s
UMAIN,
was demonstrating sensors that utilized – of all things – radar: “As long as you're within about two meters, using radar, it can detect your heart rate and your respiration rate. So in terms of monitoring for kids in nurseries, in terms
of monitoring for the elderly, for the vulnerable, for the sick, this is a fantastically noninvasive way of doing it. There’re no cameras, there're no microphones…you can hold a conversation and this thing isn't picking it up. It's picking
up respiration, it's picking up heartbeats, it's picking up activity, it's picking up presence, it's doing security monitoring -- and all through radar.”
The tools we all use are going to get a lot smarter. From motion-based
measuring tools to drills that let you know what distance into material the bit has traveled (and the precise angle of your bit, too), clever construction tools were on display at CES. Rich Green, a Palo Alto integrator who owns a company called Rich
Green Designs, was impressed by a company called
Moasure: “If you wanted to measure the fabric requirements in an acoustical space, you take this little puck, you move it around
the room, and it'll tell you with incredible accuracy precisely how much fabric you need.”