CES 2018 Innovation Awards: Meet All 20 Top Tech Winners Here

aNewDomain — Some people can’t wait to deck the halls. But for tech hounds like me, the only halls truly worth decking are the South and North Halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) at CES 2018, which opens Jan. 9, 2018.

And no, Virginia, it’s not too early to dream of backstage keynote passes and nostalgic team outings at the Nudes on Ice reunion. The Consumer Technology Association’s announced CES 2018 Innovation Award winners, it’s officially pre CES season and time to start looking at the technologies, products and initiatives sure to dominate the show — and the industry — this coming year.

Now, about those awards: This year’s panel of judges bestowed top honors to 20 products for what they judged to be overall form and function excellence across all 28 tech categories.

This year those included all the expected product categories and upcoming ones, including sustainability, self-driving cars, smart cities and our favorite, dubbed ‘tech for a better world.”

Check out the judges comprising this year’s panel here. and the criteria they used to select this year’s winners,  head here.

The winners will, as usual, all be featured at the show in the Innovation Awards Showcase — this year, it’ll be located within the Tech West pavilion in the Venetian. But why wait?

Meet all 20 CES 2018 Innovation & Design award winners, up close and personal, below:

The 2018 Nissan LEAF

Nissan Motor Company’s Nissan LEAF  is already the world’s best-selling electric vehicle. And now we’re looking at the second generation, which the company claims will drive faster, last longer and look sleeker than the current car.

Priced at about $30K and above, the 2018 Nissan LEAF is due in April, according to the company’s most recent comments. Check out its specs. And here’s the LEAF’s unveiling from earlier this year, in case you missed it …

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X

A 16-core, 32-thread architecture powers AMD’s latest Ryzen CPU, the $999 Threadripper 1950x. That’s six more cores and 12 more threads than Intel’s $999 entry, the i9 7900X.

Aimed at serious gamers and anyone who regularly records, plays, edits and/or streams video, the 3.4GHz processor is based on AMD’s enthusiast-grade X399 platform. Overclocking is encouraged, of course — and fully supported. And talk about cache: We are talking 32MB of L3 cache, 40MB combined. Check out more specs here.

Amaryllo AR4 Security Camera

The upcoming AR4 security camera finds, records and even identifies intruders, human, animalor vehicular. Its cloud-based platform and fast facial and object recognition let it spot intruders in seconds, and instantly alert and share that data over a wide cloud-based network, no dedicated hardware required.

Check out the supplier’s video. It does a good job of running through the features.

The technology, it’s worth adding, was featured in the 2016 geek flick, Why Him?

Astell & Kern’s A&ultima SP1000

The oddly-named A&ultima SP1000 portable media player a high-end, high resolution music and video player, built around octa-core CPU technology and featuring an HD5 display.

Its dual-DAC design enables accurate, bit-for-bit playback of native 32-bit/384kHz audio without compromising sound quality at all. Reviewers can’t seem to say enough about the audio quality here, and at $3K or more we hope it is divine.

Find its tech specs here.

Bang & Olufsen’s BeoSound Shape

BeoSound Shape is a super modular wireless speaker system.

You mount it on your wall tile by tile. Each one functions as speaker, amplifier or acoustic damper, so you can configure the system’s sound perfect for your space.

Tiles come in an array of sizes, shapes, colors, patterns and sound performance levels, which you can combine in any arrangement you want.

Priced at $3,000 for a base kit of six tiles or $3,800 for eight tiles, and is expandable to 11 amplifiers and 44 speaker tiles.

Blue Frog Robotics’ Buddy the Robot

Buddy the Robot was a crowd-funded crowd-pleaser when it hit first hit the scene two plus years ago. After a few bumpy reviews, its maker Blue Frog quietly stopped fulfilling early orders a few months ago.

Marketed as the ultimate home assistant –which would be capable, execs claimed, of reading to the kids, patrolling the house, screening strangers at the door and entertaining you with all that pint-sized cuteness and more — well, it’s easy to see why early reviews didn’t always thrill his expectant fans.

Now, Buddy’s back. It’ll relaunch at CES 2018, which explains the CES innovation award and the fact that it disappeared from the market sometime after the firm got a $10 million tax infusion from investors.

Blue Frog isn’t saying much about the relaunch except that it’ll ship in Europe by Christmas but it’s reasonable to expect vastly improved facial recognition, object detection, recognition and tracking features from the new bot. You’ll just have to show up at the CES 2018 Innovation awards showcase over at the Venetian to find out for sure.

If he is greatly improved, remember to save a copy of his CES 2017 Blue Frog pitch video. It’s good to remember where you came from.

Dell Ocean-Bound Plastics Packaging Program

Discouraging industries and governments from dumping plastic into our oceans is an honorable goal, but what about the five trillion pieces of plastic that’s already floating around out there?

Late last year, Dell Computers unveiled its Dell Ocean-Bound Plastics Packaging Program , which aims to establish what Dell calls a “commercial global ocean plastics supply chain.”

Translation: It’s pulling plastic out of the ocean and recycling it into plastic for its  desktop and laptop products. For instance, 25 percent of the plastic compound used in Dell’s XPS 13 2-in-1 laptop “was pulled straight from our oceans,” according to the Dell white paper covering the initiative.

Hewlett-Packard’s Camera 3D Software with Sprout Pro G2

Developed for HP’s Sprout Pro G2, HP’s new Camera 3D software works with the system’s new camera, which in turn replaces the RealSense 3D camera tech it included in previous versions.

The software still lets you capture 3D visual models for use in your augmented reality, virtual reality (VR) and  Web VR and AR applications, MS Powerpoint 3D and Adobe’s Project Felix.

The big change here is that the new HP software works directly with the integrated depth sensor inside the Sprout Pro G2 system. That means you can 3D scan real world objects just by rotating them in front of the sensor. An algorithm will remove any visible trace in the image of your fingers, too, meaning you can do all your 3D scanning using just your bare hands.

The Light 52MP L16 Camera

The Light L16 is reportedly first multi-aperture computational camera that packs DSLR quality and capabilities into a pocket-sized form factor. Funded in part by Google Ventures, Light’s big idea was to replace the traditional single-lens camera design with multiple lenses and sensors.

They lie at 45-degree angles, allowing light to simultaneously enter through 10 or more apertures when you fire off a shot. The whizzy camera features 5X optical zoom, and it utilizes folded optics tech. The result: A bonafide 52MP photo every time.

The L16 camera is scheduled for shipment next year. Check out all its specs and options here.

Wi-Charge Inc’s Wi-Charge Wireless Infrared Charging System

Nikola Tesla famously experimented with ways to deliver power wirelessly and invisibly, transmitting it like radio signals through the air. In the future, he wrote later, “beaming” power from point-to-point would be the preferred way to transfer energy. (Click here to read Tesla’s prescient 1927 Wireless Transmission article.)

It was so prescient, actually, that only now are wireless power transfer schemes like the ones Tesla first described beginning to see the light of day here in the US. One solution, from the Israeli firm Wi-Charge, only scored FDA approval in August, but it’s moving quickly to market.

The firm’s eponymous transmitter and receiver unit lets you use infrared light beams to transmit usable electrical power to charge multiple other devices within a 250 square foot range, provided line of sight remains clear. You can see it in action here.

It’s a simple solution: Just plug Wi-Charge transmitter into an AC, DC or USB power source, it will look for all other devices in the room on which you’ve installed a little thumb-sized Wi-Charge receiver. (The tiny optical receivers attach via micro-USB or Lightning connections.) Once paired, the system will automatically locate all devices that need charging and begin beaming them power simultaneously, provided they’re within line of sight, ideally on an overhead light or otherwise attached to a stable ceiling fixture.

Naver’s Mars Earbuds for Real-Time Language Translation

Co-produced by Korea’s Line Global and Naver Corp, Mars is a new wireless earbud product with some serious translation tech built in. Each “pair” is designed to be split up and worn by two people, and is capable of performing real-time translation in 10 different languages.

In addition to translating, The Mars earbuds will let users stream music, check the weather and control some IoT devices using voice commands via the Clova virtual assistant. (That’s Line’s Alexa-like digital assistant). Naver has yet to announce a US deal or release..

Aside from translation, Clova can help users stream music from several sources, check the weather forecast, and control Internet of Things (IoT) devices, all via voice commands

InstruMMents’ 01 Pen-Shaped Dimensioning Tool

InstruMMents 01 is a stylus, pen or pencil tip with a smart ruler built in.

Designed for designers, engineers, artists, carpenters and anyone else who needs to measure the dimensions of 3D spaces, the pocket-sized Instrumments 01 will transmit that data via Bluetooth to your Apple iOS or Android device or smartphone.

Nura’s Nuraphone

Nuviz is the first integrated head-up display for motorcyclists. It is a single device used for navigation, communication, camera and music. Its small wireless controller is intended to be used on the handlebar so you can keep your eyes on the road.

Intel’s Movidius Neural Compute Stick  

Intel bills Movidius as the world’s first USB-based deep learning inference kit and self-contained artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator. Designed for researchers, developers and makers, product developers, researchers and makers, this is deep neural processing in a small form factor.

Lancey Energy Storage’s Smart Electric Space Heater 

Lancey heater is a smart electric heater that lets you fine-tune its various heating options and even store electricity to power the radiator during peak periods.

It comes equipped with a battery and native energy management system, which is what you need to make that happen.

Ethereal Machines’ Halo 3D Printer

The latest Halo is an industrial-grade 5-axis 3D printer and 5-axis CNC Router.

The desktop-sized unit lits you switch between the two processes at any point during the print process. It supports multiple materials and is accurate within .002 inches, according to the company..