The best booths at CES 2024 are mysterious, big, and completely unfamiliar

CES is no stranger some extremely luxurious stalls, but this year’s conference could be a sweep (and in one case, it is). The Consumer Technology Association, which hosts the event each year, hopes to have 130,000 attendees wandering through Las Vegas in search of the latest and greatest the tech world has to offer. Being there and seeing the crowd, it’s easy to believe that the team has met and even exceeded its goals.

The biggest tech giants are willing to flex their muscles to the masses, some more enthusiastically than others (LG always comes out on top with its massive waterfall of TV screens). Meanwhile, smaller players try to stand out in more limited spaces by cramming attendees into as many pseudo-carnival rides as possible.

This is no exaggeration. South Korean technology group SK was undoubtedly one of the most over-the-top booths at CES 2024, taking CES viewers on a tour of an “SK Wonderland” that included a mini roller coaster, a “dancing car” and just a model car with rotating pistons attached , and a “magic carpet” designed to demonstrate the environmental benefits of flying cars. Instead, it just provides an example of the greed of big tech companies, with plenty of new products to gobble up. They really want to have their cake and eat it too.

On the other hand, you’ll be queuing behind walls for secret experiences. Netflix’s large chrome box on the edge of the central hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center continues to attract curious glances.What seems like a super secret VR experience at first glance is actually just a Upcoming trailers 3 physical problems Shown through some weird looking headphones. Netflix was kind enough to send me a plastic version of the headphones, which I personally think make me look like an off-brand Magneto.

While many small companies try to keep it just for product demonstrations, over-exaggeration is part of the CES culture. The first photo you saw on much of the show floor at CES this year was of a blurry young woman with headphones conspicuously pressed to her cheek. The awkward headphone arrangement and overall plasticky appearance seem to indicate that most of the promotional images for this year’s largest consumer electronics show are rapidly generated by artificial intelligence.

It may take very little effort or forethought to conceptualize a promotional image, but it does take a lot of work to put these posters up all over Vegas. We can at least appreciate the amount of work that goes into setting up and maintaining these monitors, if not revel in the sheer excess of it all.