CES 2022: Behold the parade of weird tech

From finger nibbling robots to health monitoring light bulbs, CES 2022 has delivered its usual line up of innovative if eyebrow raising products. Here’s our list of the most peculiar.

Amagami Ham Ham

The Amagami Ham Ham from Yukai Engineering is, and we don’t really know how to put this any other way, a fluffy toy that chews your finger for you.

Why would you want that? Apparently it’s stress relieving.

“Play-biting is a method to convey various emotions without words. In addition, it also provides indescribable comfort,” explained Director of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Masahiro Shiomi,Ph.D. “I believe many people would like to enjoy the feeling of pet and baby play-bites over and over again. Amagami Ham Ham will be a presence that fulfils such needs through various play-biting. Gestures like play-biting are expected not only bring comfort but also reduce stress and provide healing.”

Since it doesn’t even seem to be aimed at children, here at Telecoms.com we’ve ordered a batch to whip out and calm everyone down when a meeting gets particularly tense.

The press site also contains some sort of poem by way of explaining the gizmo, which we’re forced by way of entertainment to print in full.

The charming gesture where pets and babies gently nibble your finger with their small teeth.

Sadly, you need to harden your heart and scold them for this act.

Amagami Ham Ham frees all humanity from such dilemmas.

Motion Pillow 3

Speaking of fluffy things that just want to make your life better, the Motion Pillow 3 by 10minds is a cross between a pillow and a car’s airbag designed to stop you snoring. It senses the snoozer’s head position during sleep and detects the sound of snoring, which triggers the airbags inside the pillow to inflate.

An air bag exploding under your head would certainly seem likely to stop any snoring instantly, as you jump up and blearily shout ‘what the hell was that?’ But 10minds insists its intention is to gently secure the upper respiratory tract during sleep with the inflation mechanism. Sleep well.

Oral-B io 10

Next in a micro-trend which could be called ‘things we thought humanity had basically sorted but look out here comes CES’, is the Oral-B io 10 by Proctor and Gamble – an update on the model which won an innovation award at CES 2020.

Bearing in mind this is an object designed to wipe off crud from your teeth, the product comes loaded with a startling array of technology.

Instead of a mechanical motor, inside the toothbrush is a frictionless magnetic drive that apparently transfers all energy directly into the bristle’s tips, producing gentle micro-vibrations ‘in a way that is smooth, quiet, and sensational,’ (according to it’s write up on the CES Innovation awards website.’

You can even connect it to an app via Bluetooth, which provides ‘individual feedback and recommendations via a new 16-zone AI brushing performance analysis.

As well as a smart pressure sensor which tells you if you’re not brushing right, apparently it’s also the only brush with an OLED interactive display screen which can display personalized greetings, time tracking, mode display, and battery life.

That’ll get the sesame seed out from between your molars.

Smart Multi-Color A19 Bulb with Health Monitoring Radar

What else in your home is so pathetically low tech you just can’t stand the barbarity of it anymore? That’s right, the light bulb.

This one comes with built-in health monitoring radar technology, which is supposed to provide sleep tracking functions and biometric measurements such as heart rate and body temperature.

Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar is used alongside AI algorithms to help users monitor health statistics. And if you install multiple bulbs in the house connected via a Bluetooth Mesh network, you can create a virtual map that can ‘help detect human behaviour’ and apparently can determine if someone has fallen over and send for help. Which sounds like it’s aimed at the very elderly, who we wouldn’t usually peg as early adopters of fringe bleeding edge tech, but who knows.

Wagz Tagz

Does your stupid dog keep wandering into rooms it’s not supposed to? Fear not, Wagz has come up with a connected collar that creates ‘a smart alternative to a traditional gate.’

According to the press release: “Operating like an invisible gate, our new Tagz works with the Freedom Collar and the Wagz App to deliver a humane, shock-free correction whenever your pet enters (or jumps on) an area designated as off-limits or unsafe. The accessory extends the Freedom Collar’s core functionality from your backyard into your home: you can create virtual indoor Keep Out Zones in seconds right on your phone.”

Basically you put a bluetooth enabled ‘Tagz’ device in a spot you want your pet to avoid, such as the couch. You then set up your Tagz with your Wagz App to create ‘geofence zones’, and assign it to your pet’s Freedom Collar (a wonderfully Orwellian name).

When the roaming mutt nears or enters a ‘keep out zone’, the Freedom Collar will use ‘vibration, audible cues and ultrasonic sounds to deliver automatic corrections.’ You’ll also get a notification on your phone when this happens.

At least it sounds more humane than that collar Arnold Schwarzenegger had on in Total Recall.

Wagstagz

HaritoraX

While the metaverse is the talk of the tech town, Shiftall announced that its HaritoraX full body motion-tracking system will soon be available in the US. In a nutshell, it’s a suit you wear which is compatible with SteamVR, and is supposed to provide much better virtual experiences thanks to various motion sensors dotted around it.

According to the product website: “Having your hands full with VR goggles and a controller you can’t even get your avatar to sit on the ground or in a chair. You cannot express cuteness by sitting like a kawaii girl, nor can you strike a pose with your legs crossed. When you dive into VR social networking sites you see a lot of cute and cool avatars doing all kinds of movements. With HaritoraX, you get to express a wide range of movement.”

As well as addressing the inability to virtually express cuteness, the sheer amount of time it allows you to spend in the metaverse in avatar form seems to be a big part of the HaritoraX’s pitch: “It is possible to experience VR for even longer than 10 hours while powered by a mobile battery. VR metaverse extreme users have already adopted this approach for long hours of use (no kidding).”

Come up for air every now and again though, you might have a notification on your phone tell you the dog has walked into the bedroom, or that someone’s fallen over next to the lightbulb.

CES is always a mix of big announcements that can set the trends for the next year, some incremental but solid updates to existing product areas, and some more fringe fun stuff like the above. The fact that there’s been quite a lot of attention to the weird stuff this year could point to the fact that this CES is somewhat diminished and the half virtual show hasn’t yielded quite as much of the substantial product announcements as previous years.

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