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#Tech | CES 2024 | Cutting-Edge Products, TVs, Rabbit R1, and More

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Top left: Rabbit R1 | Bottom: 2024’s LG OLED TV are transparent TV sets you can see — and see through.

Year after year, the annual Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas each January brings with it all sorts of amazing demos, gizmos and hi-tech concepts that you won’t be available to buy for years, if ever.

But if you’re looking to snag some fabulous and futuristic products from CES 2024, don’t fret. In today’s Tech column, VanRamblings has gathered a few cool gadgets you can purchase right now, or put a dent in your bank balance very soon.

CES 2024 Best in Show | Best TV | LG OLED M4 | $3400

When it comes to innovative or life-changing new tech, it takes a lot to be the best of the best. Today we’ll provide some insight into the products that emerged out of CES we think have the power to improve everyday life.

LG’s 2024 OLED TVs come with upgraded AI upscaling utilizing precise pixel-level image analysis, that effectively sharpen objects that may appear blurry.

All driven by the discerning judgment of the AI itself, LG’s signature OLED M4 TV delivers a clearer, more vibrant viewing experience. An ingenious artificial intelligence (AI) processor adeptly refines colours by analyzing frequently used shades that best convey the mood and emotional elements intended by filmmakers and content creators. Dynamic Tone Mapping Pro splits pictures into blocks and fine-tunes brightness and contrast by analyzing variations in brightness where light enters the scene, creating images that look more three-dimensional.

In addition to its 97″, 83″ and 77″ models there’s a more normal-size 65-inch LG OLED M4 version that could actually fit into your home — and cost less, too.

VanRamblings bought CES 2023’s Best in Show Samsung NeoQLED Tizen Smart TV on Black Friday. Priced at $2999 last March, we picked it up for only $1250!

CES 2024 Best in Show | Best Gadget | Rabbit R1 | $199

Set to become all the rage among the tech-forward crowd later this year, and predicted to catch on with the tech-oriented general public soon after, the Rabbit R1 is a lot like a phone in terms of its looks, and in some of its features: it has a camera and a SIM card slot, and it supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. What’s different, and what makes the Rabbit R1 special, is the interface: instead of a grid of apps, you get an AI assistant that talks to your favorite apps and does everything for you.

For example, you could get the R1 to research a holiday destination & book flights to it, or queue up a playlist of your favourite music, or book you an Uber. In theory, you can do almost anything you can already do on your phone, just by asking.

We’ve seen next-gen personal assistants depicted in movies like Her, and the R1 is trying to make that a reality — leveraging the latest AI capabilities to replace the traditional smartphone interface with something a lot more intuitive.

CES 2024 Best in Show | Gaming Device | XREAL Air 2 AR glasses | $489

 

The XREAL Air 2 Ultra AR glasses offer the most advanced augmented reality wearable experience from the brand to date with hand and head tracking meeting spatial anchoring across a full 6DoF (six degrees of freedom).

Augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), extended-reality (XR), whatever you want to call it, 2024 is lining up to be a big year for this tech with the popularity of the Meta Quest 3 expanding and Apple’s release of its Vision Pro headset.

CES 2024 Best in Show | Bemis BB-1200 Bidet Toilet | $399

If you’re less about TVs and AI, and more about something weird (and potentially practical), then there’s always the new Bemis BB-1200 Bidet Toilet. That’s right, it’s a smart toilet seat, capable of supplying unlimited warm water, a heated seat, air dryer alongside a remote and smartphone app to control it all.

You can really control everything from nozzle position to water pressure and seat temperature. There are even two user pre-sets so your preferences are saved and ready to go when you need it most. It sounds silly, but if it makes your bathroom experience a little more comfortable (especially in the cold winter months), then you shouldn’t dismiss it quite so easily.

The BB-1200 will be available this spring, and will set you back $399. Just make sure your bathroom has an outlet near the toilet to power everything.

CES 2024 Best in Show | Best Home Product | Family Hub+ | $2499

Samsung has gone all-in on artificial intelligence across its phones and home appliances. This includes a new AI Family Hub+ technology that is designed to bring together different appliances.

It is initially being built into the new Bespoke 4-door flex refrigerator, unveiled at CES 2024. This includes internal cameras and AI vision capable of identifying individual food items. It can then suggest recipes based on what you have in stock.

CES 2024 Best in Show | Roborock Zeo One | $1699

The Roborock Zeo One is an all-in-one washer / dryer combo machine that pulls double duty. It’s part of a relatively new breed of laundry combo machines that are just beginning to proliferate. Needless to say, the concept is compelling: you pile a load of laundry into a single machine where it’s washed and dried. But the Zeo One adds even more innovation to the mix.

A favourite feature: smart dosing. Instead of adding detergent and fabric softener with each load, you can fill the reservoirs and go for months without worrying about adding anything to your laundry.

The Zeo One also dries clothes using much less heat than a conventional dryer.
The Zeo-cycle drying system uses a large honeycomb-shaped disc with more than 20,000 holes to absorb moisture, using sensors and an AI algorithm to monitor the drying system more than 100 times per minute. By keeping the heat low, the Roborock Zeo One prevents damage to delicate garments like wool sweaters.

The Zeo One even collects lint and disposes of it automatically through a water line, so you never have to clear a lint trap.

CES 2024 Best in Show | Health Device | BeamO | $249

Withings’ BeamO might be the only health checkup device you need in your home, a first-of-its-kind 4-in-1 health checkup device meant to replace four essentials that should be in every home, combining an ECG, pulse oximeter, stethoscope, and thermometer into a single compact device. With it, you can monitor your heart and lung health, as well as your temperature.

There are those in the medical profession who believe the BeamO will revolutionize the measurement of the core vitals carried out during medical visits from the comfort of one’s own home. This crucial data will provide a vital overview of overall health or warning signs of potential areas of concern. Instead of measuring these stats a couple of times a year in a clinical setting, it will be possible to assess them every day. BeamO will be the thermometer of the future, providing the ability to assess temperature and observe the state of the heart and lungs.

Of course, a parent can also use the device to perform a checkup on a child.

In the future, the company says the BeamO will detect signs of infection and even possible cardiovascular issues such as atrial fibrillation (AfiB).

The Withings BeamO will be released this coming June, and will retail for $249.

#ArtsFriday | The Digital Revolution in Filmmaking

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Human history, since time immemorial, has been undeniably marked by a series of revolutions that helped shape us as modern individuals.

Our whole concept of civilization is determined by a succession of consecutive turning points.

From the early Neolithic Revolution, 12,000 years ago, through the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century and the Jet Age of the 1950s and 1960s, our species has evolved enormously.

In the current age, the Digital Revolution — also known as the Third Industrial Revolution — is the continuous evolution from the previous models of analog, mechanical and electronic technologies to the transformative digital technology with which we have all become familiar in recent years (think: streaming).

In 1993, digital technology revolutionized cinema.

The highest-grossing movie that year was Jurassic Park, whose dinosaurs ironically represented an evolutionary leap. Audiences were wowed by those hyper-realistic digital effects — all six minutes of them.

Leading up to its release, the 2009 movie Avatar promised to be a record-shattering hit.

In order to capitalize on the blockbuster to the fullest extent, movie theatres around the world got rid of their creaky old film projectors and purchased sleek digital replacements.

While projection technology had been available for a decade, it took the promise of a digital smash hit to convince theatres to adopt it at a large scale.

Before long, digital filmmaking and digital projection had become the industry standard. While it was an expensive investment for theatres, it allowed them to be more nimble in what they screened.

“It’s not a surprise that this transition took place: physical film was particularly inefficient. It’s heavy and it’s expensive,” says University of California, Berkeley marketing professor Eric Anderson. “What was more surprising was how this affected the assortments [of movies] offered to consumers.”

“With digital,” Professor Anderson continues, “it’s easier to have time for niche films, because one employee can manage all the screens in a theatre, and can effortlessly switch between one movie and another with the push of a digital button. Digital technology also gives the theatres more flexibility to stream big blockbusters even more. In a study conducted recently, it was interesting that we found these two effects together.”

The very first fully digital film, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, was screened in Los Angeles in 1999. But it took time for theatres to switch over, in part because the new equipment was so expensive.

A single digital projector could cost as much as $150,000 — an eye-popping sum for a theatre with eight screens to convert.

As a result, Anderson says, theatres “fought the change as much as they could until it was shown to them very clearly that the economics made sense.”

Initially, there was little urgency.

From 1999 until the early 2000s, relatively few films were released in a digital format — mostly big-budget offerings, such as Star Wars and Toy Story 2.

Converting came with a host of benefits: the film era required the creation of costly physical copies of movies. The number of times per day a theatre could screen a hit movie was limited by the number of copies they had.

Film also posed logistical challenges: each movie required several reels that were heavy and hard to manipulate, and the process of switching between movies on a projector was time-consuming.

As a result, theatres tended to show only one movie per screen each day. Digitization changed all that, making it effortless to offer more movie variety to consumers.

Still and all, the financial crisis of 2008 continued to slow the transition to digital by making it difficult for theatres to borrow the capital they needed to upgrade their equipment.

But Avatar “acted as a rallying point to get the industry to transition, which James Cameron pushed very hard for,” Anderson explains.

As the highest grossing movie of all time, Avatar was also the first 100% digitally photographed “film” to win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Not since George Lucas’ Attack of the Clones had a director tried to fundamentally change the cinema-going experience and, love him or hate him, James Cameron meant to do just that.

Cameron immersed audiences in the alien world of Pandora by incorporating ground-breaking 3D along with the digital Fusion Camera System to capture his vision, ushering in the final shift towards digital cinema for the majority of movie productions.

From that point on, the conversion process picked up momentum; 90% of movie screens worldwide had gone digital by 2015.

The true effects of the digital transformation became apparent and overall movie variety increased. Smaller theatres with four or fewer screens saw the most noticeable increases,  about 11%. In larger theaters, the percentage of screens devoted to blockbusters increased during weekend hours, but decreased on the weekdays, resulting in greater variety during these less-popular times.

In other words, theatres prioritized blockbusters during peak periods and “offered slightly more variety or more niche films during off-peak periods,” Anderson observes. “It’s a more efficient use of their screen space, given the ebb and flow of consumer demand.”

As filmmaker John Boorman noted in a 2023 article in The Guardian, “Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans was the only Best Picture Oscar nominee this year shot on celluloid.”

“For more than 100 years, films have been made of film,” Boorman observes. “Now, instead of a magazine being loaded on to the camera, a card is inserted that electronically records whatever the camera sees.”

“Today, most ‘films’ are made electronically,” says Boorman. “No film is used in the making of them — not the shooting, editing or projection. So they can’t — or shouldn’t — be called films.”

Change, as most of us know, is constant, and inevitable, if in the eyes of cinema purists, “regrettable.”

Perhaps the time has come to change the language we employ to describe what we see at the cinema, or on our screens at home.

Unless a new picture is actually made of film, it should not be called a film.

Perhaps, going forward, we should refer to it as a …

Arts Friday | Netflix Takes Over the Oscars in 2021

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Netflix to overtake the Oscar ceremony in 2021

In 2019, Netflix landed its first Oscar nomination for Best Picture with the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s critically acclaimed Roma. A year later, the streaming service was leading the field with 24 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture nods for both The Irishman and Marriage Story.
As Netflix’s impact on the world of cinema became increasingly undeniable, the younger and more diverse film academy was no longer prepared to shun the streaming service as the old Hollywood guard tried to do. Earlier this year, on April 28th, responding to the changes that COVID-19 had wrought, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences removed the stipulation that a movie must be shown in a theatre before it could become eligible for the coveted Best Picture Oscar nomination.
And thus the stage was set for an Oscar ceremony in 2021 the likes of which no one will have ever seen before, with at least seven Netflix releases eligible for a Best Picture nomination, with each of those films set for Oscar nominations, ranging from Best Actor and Actress, Supporting Actress and Actor, to Best Director, Music, Sound and technical awards.
Today on VanRamblings, the Netflix features set to dominate Oscars 2021.

For the upcoming Academy Awards — delayed due to the pandemic until Sunday, April 25th — Netflix has pulled out all the stops. Already streaming, there’s Spike Lee’s Best Picture contender Da 5 Bloods, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s well-mounted action thriller The Old Guard, and Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay contender, I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
And, available today on Netflix, there’s writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 which is, as Variety lead critic Owen Gleiberman writes, “a knockout, and the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful, authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today, a briskly paced and immersive film bristling with Sorkin’s distinctive verbal fusillades, a cinematic powder keg of film with a serious message that seamlessly blends a conventional yet compelling courtroom procedural with protest reenactments and documentary footage, the film offering an absorbing primer of a ruefully meaningful period in American history.”

Due to arrive on Netflix on Tuesday, November 24th — on the eve of American Thanksgiving — director Ron Howard’s big budget film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s autobiographical best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy offers a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town, that also provides broader, probing insight into the struggles of America’s white working class.
A passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis, Glenn Close and Amy Adams are at the centre of Howard’s film, and solid prospects for Best Actress and Best Supporting Oscar nods. Howard will be in the mix, as well.

Netflix will release David Fincher’s Mank in select theatres in November before the black-and-white film begins streaming on December 4th.
The Hollywood-centric period piece follows alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (certain Best Actor nominee Gary Oldman) as he races to finish the screenplay for Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. That classic picture was fraught with behind the scenes drama, as Mankiewicz and Welles argued over credit and who wrote what, which became even more important once the film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
The original script for Mank was written by Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher, so this project certainly means a lot to the filmmaker. Mank boasts a running time of 2 hours and 11 minutes, so it won’t be quite as long as Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, not that Fincher ever wastes a single frame. The film is expected to be a major awards contender for Netflix.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. George C. Wolfe directs, Denzel Washington produces, and Oscar-winner Viola Davis (Fences) stars as Ma Rainey in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s adaptation of the hit August Wilson Broadway play. The late Chadwick Boseman and If Beale Street Could Talk star Colman Domingo play members of Rainey’s ’20s jazz band.
Awards prospects: Ambitious trumpeter Levee was 43-year-old Boseman’s final role before succumbing to his private battle with colon cancer in August; he looks rail thin in film stills. Posthumous Oscars went to Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) and Peter Finch (Network) among others. In this case, with the beloved Black Panther star also in the running for his supporting role as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam in the Spike Lee joint, Da 5 Bloods, many believe that it’s likely Boseman will wind up in the Best Actor category for Ma Rainey, with Davis as Best Actress. Like Mank, the elaborate period setting should be attractive to Academy craft branches.
Release date: In theatres early December, streams on Netflix December 18.

The Midnight Sky, director-star George Clooney's new sci-fi film for Netflix

Oscar-winner and Hollywood icon George Clooney directs The Midnight Sky, a sci-fi thriller with a script by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) based on the Lily Brooks-Dalton novel about an Arctic scientist (Clooney) attempting to warn a NASA spaceship astronaut (Felicity Jones) not to return to doomed planet Earth. Awards prospects: Netflix took advantage of the London Film Festival this month (October 2 – 18) with a tribute to Clooney, complete with clips. Critical reaction will determine whether The Midnight Sky will figure in the Oscar sweepstakes, but Clooney (Syriana) has delivered in the past, as has Oscar-nominated Jones (Theory of Everything).
Release date: In theatres early December, Netflix début to be announced.