CES 2022 Strips Down the Biggest Tech Show of the Year in Las Vegas

While the pandemic hit the Las Vegas CES 2022 convention with big cancellations, the show still went on.

In any other year when visiting CES in Las Vegas, the experience can be a bit overwhelming with everything it has to offer over every square foot of just the convention center. In past pre-pandemic years, it was nearly impossible to take in everything the show has to offer between its many halls and outlying exhibition rooms scattered from one end of the strip to the other. This year, visitors were greeted to a new experience: wide aisles, new exhibitors, and even an all-new, enormous East exhibition hall that had lots of great things to see, but still felt really empty. But in the case of the LG booth, it was intentionally meant to look empty, giving visitors a chance to scan a QR code, have a seat, and experience their products virtually (which required a lot less staff needed to interact with attendees and media).

But while some of the halls were closed and lots of space was provided by the lack of some bigger companies and the usual swatch of foreign attendees, the show felt more manageable and provided access to a lot of companies that might have gotten overlooked in past years.

There were still plenty of home entertainment hardware makers like TCL, Hisense, Sony, LG, and Samsung filling the center hall with rows of gorgeous, brilliantly-lit televisions at resolutions and sizes that were hard to imagine one could afford even just a few years ago.

In the brand new East Hall, the massive room featured the next step in the evolution of electric powered single seater cars to huge Mack trucks. There was even an autonomous Formula 1 race car on display. And the vehicle that EdisonFuture displayed was hard to describe, except that it seemed to feature every comfort imaginable.

And of course, no CES would be complete without showcasing the latest in mobile phones, robotics, audio, and drone technology. Then there was a wide variety of gaming companies showcasing everything from the most comfy gaming chairs and prototype desks (Razer) to indie vendors showing off their custom pinball and arcade machines (iiRcade), packed with classics ready to play. Let’s not forget all the latest in virtual reality and augmented reality, which put you in the middle of a live Kpop concert one minute, a trandescent forest the next, or on a battlefield on the other side of the galaxy, giving you the fight of your life.

Some of the most understated exhibitions were simply the endless array of appliances and new technology that exists to make our most common daily tasks even simpler. Whether it’s cleaning your home or driving your car, the technology we’ll likely take for granted 5 or 10 years from now was on full display. But that’s par for the course for any year at CES. It’s good to see that that aspect certainly hadn’t changed despite the reduction in exhibitors and crowds.

I’ve been going to CES annually for almost 10 years now and it’s amazing to see that things I saw in 2012 are just becoming commonplace today, while others have disappeared completely from existence. Either way, it’s a tech fetishist’s dreamland, now more than ever. More than anything, it was good to be able to get hands-on with the future of technology once again.