Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve already had a handful of 3D printing companies swing by our stage this year, but what sets Formlabs apart from the increasing competition is a focus on bringing professional level printing to the consumer. We’ll be speaking with one of the company’s founders, Maxim Lobovsky about Formalabs’ vision.

Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!

Update: video embedded

Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with Formlabs’ Maxim Lobovsky (update: video embedded)

Filed under: Misc

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Is 2013 the year of the wearable here at CES? It’s certainly shaping up to be one of the bigger trends of the show, thanks in no small part to the folks at Oculus. We’ve already spent some time with the company’s Rift prototype this week, and now we’ll be joined by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Update: In lieu of Brendan Iribe, we’ll be speaking to Palmer Luckey and VP Nate Mitchell.

Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!

Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with Oculus’s Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell (update: speaker change)

Filed under: Gaming

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When I saw Greg Kumparak‘s facial reaction while he demoed Skullcandy’s new Crusher headphones yesterday, I had to go try them myself. When TechCrunch TV director Jon Orlin saw my resulting facial reaction, he decided we needed to get one fresh on camera. 10 minutes later, we had our own Elin Blesener in front of the lens, and her reaction was just what we expected.

With the Crushers, Skullcandy promises something that many a headphone company has promised to do before: to physically rattle your head as a subwoofer might. Unlike the past attempts we’ve seen, these ones actually seem to do it. We sat down with Skullcandy Acoustics Engineer Sam Noertker at our big ol’ CES broadcast booth to chat about how it all works.

Rather than trying to fake a bunch of bass with digital signal processing, the Crushers use an individually powered second driver to trigger a proprietary (and rather hush-hush) vibration system. Even in the sub-optimal audio testing environment that is the parking lot outside of CES, we all walked away pretty impressed.

Will the $100 Crushers smoke your $300 Sennheisers or your $500 Shures? Of course not. With that said, the vibration system has a much greater effect than I expected from something I’d been quick to write off as a gimmick.

Look for a full review of these in the coming weeks.

Sure plenty of companies are waiting for devoted conferences like E3 to launch their peripherals, but this year’s CES has afforded an interesting opportunity for smaller organizations to steal the spot light. We’ll be meeting with Razer’s Heath Hatcher to discuss the Edge, and what it’s like launching gaming hardware in a company ruled by a few huge company.

Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!

Update: video embedded

Continue reading Live from the Engadget CES Stage: an interview with Razer’s Heath Hatcher (update: video embedded)

Filed under: Gaming

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When peak performance is your goal, every second counts. I guess milliseconds count too. Product development consultancy Cambridge Consultants had this in mind when they developed their new automatic gear-shifting system for performance bicycles called The Connected Bike. The idea is to shave off those precious seconds of time you use both considering and shifting gears while riding. We took an up-close and personal look at CES 2013.

Using their new system, which combines some simple mechanics and sensors with the brains of a smartphone attached to the bike, you enter a specific performance goal you are trying to achieve — ride X number of miles in Y number of minutes, for example.

Then, the smartphone attached to the bike is able to calculate, in real time, when your performance has dipped. It then re-calculates and automatically shifts the gears for you to optimize your riding, in relation to your goal.

The aggregate performance data is viewable with the bikes’ own iPad app as well.