 Hello and welcome to Top Shelf. This is our daily afternoon show about all the gadgets and gizmos and all the weird stuff we found at CES. And there's a lot of it. I was actually out on the show floor for like two and a half hours yesterday and it was the most exhausting thing I've ever done in my life, just trying to look at things. Here to talk about it all with me is my long lost co-host. I missed you yesterday. Neil Ipatel. Welcome back. You think you're so handsome. I just... And you're right. That's what you think, saying really nice things in a really threatening, ominous way. I like that. You did a good job. I kind of, I want to cry right now. I would like to cry. How are you? People. I'm very tired so I hope you're ready for a free form journey into my body. It was Kesha last night. Just ruined you forever. You didn't come down from Kesha until about ten minutes ago. Yeah, pretty much. Also I watched... The four minutes of Kesha. I watched Josh watch Blackjack. And then he was just, I don't know if that's something you want to... No, not feeling the Blackjack. And then you let Michael, Michael Shane won like $300. Yeah. Good for Michael Shane. Yeah. I have always lost thousands of dollars playing Blackjack. I don't think I've ever want to handle Blackjack in my life. That's a fun fact. One time our operations assistant, Leah, was there playing and she had this like, essentially like a bio computer of nerds behind her telling her exactly what to do. And she won $700 in four hands, like immediately. But it was only because of this like brain trust of nerds being like, I don't know, I have to do some calculations. Like Watson sitting behind you. Yeah, it was amazing. Everyone else was so mad. That's awesome. But then we took our money and we ran away. And then we spent the money at other places. And then they kicked you out and tried to beat you up. Then the casino. Now they're making a movie. It's a whole thing. And so anyway, there's lots of news to talk about. This is day, I don't know, day 50. How long have we been here? Like a thousand years. Yeah. But it's like the last full day of CES. Right. And it's our last show actually. It is. It's our last show. CES is kind of. I'm going to miss you. I'm going to miss you too. CES is kind of winding down. It's still, there's still, what is it? Like 160,000 people here. Yeah. But the actual news, the cool new stuff is all sort of out there. It's all been done. Yeah, we've seen it all. So what we're going to do is talk about some of the biggest things that happened and some of the bigger trends and cooler stuff. And there's actually a lot. You know, I think the biggest overarching trend here is the rise of the indie hardware startup and how many of them there are. A lot of them are funded by Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Adrian did a great report on that. Right. So a lot of the biggest stuff we saw this week wasn't from Samsung or Sony or Panasonic. They all had these big kind of, would you call them busts? I kind of want to call their press conferences busts where they were like, you know, big bombastic in their like 4k TVs. And like, that's cool, but nothing is really, you know, life changing, blowing my mind with possibilities. I keep comparing it. I don't know why this keeps coming up to me, but like two or three years ago there was a, Seuss was here and they put out like 500 concepts in the press conference. Yeah. It was exciting and weird. And it's like, who is this company? And like, what are they talking about? I literally don't know what you're talking about, but that phone looks cool. And that, there wasn't a lot of that this year. I think Samsung showed off like a curved display phone. Yeah. But it's really the little guys, some of whom aren't even on the show floor, who are here and they've all got really cool ideas. They're getting funding in a variety of like new ways basically. And they're, I think in Adrian's piece, the difference is she's like, Samsung and Sony, those guys, they look around the world at like what the manufacturing partners are doing. They're like, okay, that panel is ready and this chip is ready and now we're going to glue them together and that's our new smart phone. That's how Samsung and LG end up releasing the world's first OLED TV at exactly the same time. And the indie guys are basically saying, what do I want? And then they're building that and that's really different. But then there's another trend, which I think is really interesting, which is there are, there's a lot of robots in automation in the show. And Paul Miller, right? Yeah. Paul Miller, who's not on the internet. You may have heard of him. He's not on the internet. That's all I know about him. But he's standing outside. He is standing outside, not on the internet at this moment. That's very important. Paul, you went to iRobot, right? Yeah. Paul, you're a bolt not on the internet. Yeah. I went to iRobot, yes. We know we have heat on the internet. So tell us, what did you see at iRobot? What's iRobot up to now? Well so, they got a new pool cleaning robot, which is exciting. iRobot is doing exactly what iRobot has always done, which is they make these horribly boring, not even that great vacuum cleaners. Now pool cleaning robot. The Looch, which cleans your gutters. Oh my god. There's a new Looch out at this year's CES. Does it clean your gutters better? Yeah, better. Here's what I don't understand about iRobot. Let me just ask you this question. As far as I know, iRobot makes military robots that can kill you. No, they can't kill you. They make a line of domestic robots. Paul's saying they can't kill you. They can kill you. Fine. They can definitely kill you. They can drive around and identify who to kill, right? And then they make a line of extremely boring things that can clean various parts of your home. Do they make anything for consumers that is useful? I think is the question. Well, so for one, they are selling a ton of vacuum cleaners and they are making money. And that's what makes them kind of the most interesting, exciting, best robotics company in the world is because they make money and they are a real business. And for like Toyota and Honda show off these great concepts, but they never sell them to us. So iRobot makes these Roombas and then these military robots. But what they've been doing for years now is developing really great intellectual property. And for the past two CESs, they are showing off this thing called Ava and it's their mobility platform which can map out a space. It can navigate a space autonomously, avoid running into people. And it's finally mature enough that it's going into a product. It's the RP Vita, which is a hospital telepresence robot. And I got to play around with it. It's just dead simple. You've got like an iPad app, like a doctor would have an iPad app. They pull up like a list of hospital rooms basically, tap on the name of a room and the robot just drives there. And you really don't have to worry about it. It will map its own course. It will avoid running into people. So the top half of the robot is developed by In Touch Health, which they've been doing telepresence robots, but they're stationary before. So this is like a really great commercial application. Not for consumers. It's about like $5,000 a month to get one of these in a hospital. But to be honest, as far as healthcare costs and when you're talking about monitoring stroke victims and stuff, that's actually decently reasonable. And so, but again, iRobot is all about making this a sustainable business. They're going to make money on this. And the thing is that they've developed really great technology here and will continue to develop technology in this realm that will lead to eventually, Colin Angle, the CEO I talked to, said about 10 years for a personal home robot. And there's a lot of problems still. A home robot to be really useful is probably going to need an arm. It's probably going to need to be able to go up and down stairs. It's going to need a base that's not as large. So there's still a lot to figure out. It's going to need a laser weapon of some kind. But they're on the path. Yeah, laser weapon for sure. But there are a lot of developments lately that are getting closer. So here's my question. I went to LG's booth yesterday and they were like, we have an unprecedented new robot, robot vacuum. It's a square. Oh. And it's like, it's literally a square. And they're like, you've never seen a vacuum like this before. And you're like, that's true. I have not. It's like, this one's a square. I mean, like, are those companies a threat to iRobot? Do they represent actual competition to this company? And can somebody get this done in less than 10 years? That's my big question. And can somebody make something that isn't a vacuum cleaner? Right. Well, iRobot actually just bought another company. I think it's Evolution Robotics, which makes the Mint, which is square. The Mint is like a Swiffer robot. So you put a Swiffer pad on it. And it uses different technology for navigation. And so iRobot bought them for that product, which I think was a successful product. It's a little cheaper than iRobot's own products. But also intellectual property. I think there's sort of a race is on. And Colin Angle talks about how he sees a robot, like there being a robot butler. And you won't have to manage the little robots that are doing your little chores around the house. You'll engage with a robot butler. The thing is, is that we are engaging with robot butlers right now on our phones, like with Siri and Google Now. And Colin Angle admits iRobot is not in the business of developing that sort of artificial intelligence. They're in manipulation and navigation and that sort of stuff. So we might just be controlling our smart homes with our phones, like we saw at LG. You touch your phone through the washer and dryer. So there's a question if we'll have robots in our homes in that role that he wants. I still think there is a role for a robot in the home with an arm that can do stuff, pick stuff up, fold your laundry, make your bed. But we're still at least an order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude away from shipping something like that to consumers as far as price. Something that you would want in your home right now probably costs $100,000 to build. And you'd probably want to pay $1,000 to $2,000 for something like that ultimately. Cool Paul, thank you so much for talking to us. I just have to make it 10 years and then I get one of these things. Colin Angle says, you know, everybody always says 10 years, that's a robotics cliche. Oh, it'll be in 10 years and then it never happens. Colin Angle says he never says that. So he's really serious this time. 10 years. 10 years. I'm writing it down. What's the date? I don't know what the date is. 10 years from this. May 10th, 2013. If I can't buy one, burning the building down. All of the buildings. Paul, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks guys. So do you want to roll, like I want to roll out really bad. I had a room but it was so broken that I didn't. My favorite thing that I've seen is the DJ Roombas where you just put a speaker on top of a Roomba. It's not an actual thing. You just put a speaker on top of a Roomba and it just goes around playing music. I could get into that. That seems amazing. I mean, but that's not even a Roomba, that's just a speaker that doesn't, that like bumps into things hilariously. I don't know, you say that like it's not the greatest thing in the world. Fair, fine. So one of the other things we've seen a lot of is like different ways. Don't you dare contradict me. I'll go, I'm sorry. One of the other things we've seen a lot of is like different ways to interact with gadgets. That's one of the big things is like how do we use our stuff? And even robots kind of play into that. It's like, you know, how we interface with this whole world around us. And there's a lot of it here. Everything here is, I mean, it's kind of like there's a sense. I know we have some video and some stuff to look at, but there's a sense where it's like 3D was, where the TV manufacturers sold everybody an HDTV and they're like, man, we got to come up with something else like that. And like what they sell on is 3D. It's like everybody else is looking at Microsoft selling the Kinect and they're like, we need something like that. And they don't, I'm not convinced that everybody has all the parts like Microsoft had with the Kinect. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is it was when we were talking about the Pebble watch yesterday, Dieter said something I thought was really smart and he was saying, there's not a lot of bells and whistles, but like if you don't have all the bells, you can make better whistles. And I feel like that's what Kinect did. It's like this really basic thing that they did really, really well. And all these other things are really cool. And you know, you see the possibility for like, Leap Motion blew my mind. Really? I haven't heard of it. It was still like it just the fact that it could recognize all of my fingers and then I could put a pencil in between my fingers and it would recognize that that was different from the finger that I, it just was crazy. And so there's all this stuff that you can do, but it seems like, what are you going to do with it? Right. It's like a fun novelty. Right. And so Russell Brandom wrote a really great report on, it's actually interesting. All those companies are here, but they're not really talking to consumers. They have like little offices where like Sony and Samsung and Microsoft, they're all going to meet with them and see what they can do. And you know, Intel has a big push for what they're calling perceptual computing. I mean, it's, again, like to me, there's, I have a definite sense that like everyone like woke up to touch and what Microsoft's doing with the Kinect, with natural user interface there. And there's a big rush to like try it out and see what their version of HD will be. And I think there's going to be a lot of fallout. So one that we did get to try out was the Tobii eye tracker, which is another pretty wacky thing and Tom Warren got to play with it. So let's check that out. Hey guys, this is Tom Warren from The Verge and we're looking at Tobii's Rex eye tracking technology for Windows 8. So rather a one time calibration, you basically hold down the delete key and then you can navigate across the whole interface. So this is working on Windows 8 now. So you can see that I've got my hand on the delete key here. If I look at mail and then I hit delete, it'll launch mail. Now I can go and look at the Microsoft account team email on there and then hit delete again and it'll navigate to that. So you're basically using your eyes to track where you want the cursor to be and then the delete key will actually trigger that action. So I can start a new email if I look at the plus at the top right and there's all sorts of other ways as well. If we go into the maps application, you can actually use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in. So if I look at Toronto and then I start zooming in and out, it will do that navigation for you and then I can look to Pittsburgh in the very left there and I can scroll in and out as well. If we go back and then we go to Internet Explorer, you can use the insert key and if I hold that down and then look to the bottom of the page, it'll start scrolling and if I look to the top, it'll start scrolling to the top. So we saw this last year and Toby are going to be shipping this to consumers later on in the year. It seems like it's a lot more accurate than it was before. If I go and look at people, it seems to be working quite well when I look at the desktop. That's Toby's Rex eye tracking technology for Windows 8. I feel like all I want to do with that is stand behind people as they use computers and just stare at things while they click and just wait and see what happens. And that's... Does it get confused? I don't know. That stuff is like, that's great, but is it useful? Do you care? Is there really buy one of those? Yeah, I don't know how much, like, is it that much more work? So anyway, the thing I think is the coolest of all of these wacky things that we've done is... And I had an interesting combination of robotics and UI. And yeah, is self-driving cars. It's Chris Ziegler. Yeah, it's Chris Ziegler. So Chris showed up to CES, basically got off the plane and just disappeared for like days and days and days. Gone. You were like, I have to go hang out somewhere. I assumed you were dead or gambling or those. Just those. Those are the only two things. What concerns me is that you assumed I was dead and you didn't think to do anything about it. I mean, I figured we had work to do. You were busy gambling. Yeah. Busy gambling. I gambled in your honor. I poured one out for you. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So what were you actually doing? So I was deeply embedded in the world of auto journalism, which is a very foreign thing for us. But no, it was great. I checked out, Lexus had a self-driving car here that they didn't actually demo, but they've been demonstrating it privately in both Japan and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is where Trina is located, which is their research arm. They've been doing that for the past five years and they just showed it for the first time publicly here. And then we checked out Audi, which eventually they're going to get to true self-driving cars, but in the short term they're doing what they're calling a self-parking car. It's basically you walk outside your hotel, you press a button on your smartphone and the car creeps around the corner at 2.1 miles an hour or something. Which for the record is just astonishingly slow. Yes. Right, but it's awesome. The video you guys made is awesome. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's- Can you say shields? Shields. You could, but I wouldn't, if you said shields, I still wouldn't go into an area with gunfire. I wouldn't do it. That's the best in Batman, the first Batman. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. When the Batmobile- He's like racing at him and he just walks out there and he's like, stop. I love that this happened to this movie, but why would anyone do that? Right. So I would definitely, if I was like the first guy on my block with that feature, I would definitely talk into the phone like I was talking to the car remotely and then everyone would just assume. And then it would slowly creep up at you. At 2.1 miles per hour. It's super creepy the first time it happens, when the car just appears around the corner and there's no one in it. It's weird. So yeah, that's what I was doing this week. And so all these companies are making a big deal out of, this is the future, this is the craziest thing that's ever happened in the world. So Ford's CTO, Paul Mascarenas, who we actually talked to this week, said last year that Google has kind of pushed the entire industry in the direction of self-driving cars. They forced the issue and everyone is having to respond. For Google, it's just a means to an end. Google doesn't seem that interested in selling me a self-driving car, but everybody else kind of caught on to the idea and is now doing it themselves. I think Google is doing it because they can. Would you buy a Google car? Google does everything because they can. Would you buy a Google car? Like if Google made a car, would you buy it? No. You wouldn't? I mean, too many ads in your face. It's not that. It's like Google makes a car. Like what are Verizon and Samsung going to do to it first? That's true. Google now would be sweet though. What kind of spot should I do? It's going to be in my car. Droid car 2. You'd open the car and it would make like a droplet sound. No, I mean, you know. Does it have LTE? Actually the Audi does have LTE. Before they were doing HSPA and they just upgraded LTE. So that's neither here nor there. So they're going to get to self-driving cars eventually, but the problem is that they're very careful in the language that they use to describe these vehicles because they know that there's this looming legislative battle around getting these things legalized. So they're being very careful not to call them autonomous cars, not to say that they drive themselves. They're like, oh, it's a safety feature. We're helping the driver. And it was really interesting to hear the very, very careful language that every single executive used to describe what they're trying to do here. Let me ask you the real question. It's not whether I'm going to buy a Google car. It's whether this technology, it's not even whether it's legalized. If there's demand for it, if people want it, the legal stuff will get sorted out. Maybe it'll be a little bit slower than we'd like, but it will definitely get sorted out. But without the demand, there's no reason for Congress to spend its time talking about self-driving cars, right? That's true, but I would also argue that there are many things that people want that aren't legal. I mean... That's fair. Yeah. Well, so actually, I mean, let's talk about some of this legal stuff because it's like we're not going to get anywhere until we figure this out, right? And so Russell Brandom, who's been a busy guy this week, has been out, has written some stuff on us, for us about this before, and is actually here in a totally different place from where Paul was a few minutes ago, just to be very clear about that. But so Russell, tell us a little bit about some of the big legal issues that are going on here. Yeah. I mean, the main thing is all the laws are written as if there's a driver in the car. So there are all these things the driver has to be that autonomous drivers aren't going to be. They aren't going to be, you know, conscious, and they're going to be in control of the car, but it's sort of not... It's just hard to make those laws work with essentially a robot driver. Like how do you give it an eye test? How do you do sort of any of the things people do to get driver's licenses? Well, it seems to me that the bigger problem is, I mean, you could, I'm sure you could develop a certification program for robot cars, but our laws are punitive. When you make a mistake, we punish you. Right. And it's like, how do you punish a robot driver for making the wrong decision? You can just be like, what? I was sitting in the passenger seat. It's like, your robot blew the stop sign. Like, bad robot. So what's the situation with that stuff? Well, the concern is that you sue the person who made the robot driver, right? So if it was, you know, if it was this... This is why I think companies like Lexus are being so careful is because they don't want me to say, oh, I thought the Lexus was going to sort of drive for me and it would be fine. And if you get in that paradigm, then anything it does, Lexus could potentially be liable for. So you sort of don't know until people start suing each other, but it's also, you know, a $50 billion, like auto liability lawsuits are $50 billion a year. It's huge. And so there's really, it's kind of a dangerous pool to wade into. I don't know. I would just blame the robot. I'm sure. Look, what we need to do is develop robots that have feelings. And then you can blame them. Right. And then you can blame them and they'll feel bad about what they've done. I mean, that's actually, I think the most interesting of all the robot stuff. Like no one worries about the legal implications of a vacuum cleaner that can like bounce around your house. Once you put things in like a two ton car and say, don't worry about it, the robot, it'll take care of it. And they're very careful to not call them robots, right? Right. Actually the head of Audi's R&D lab, Wolfgang Durrheimer said that we are not out to compete with the robot industry. Which I thought was a very interesting way of putting it. Check out this robot we built. Yeah. Check out this robot. Yeah, it's going to be many, many years until they figure out exactly how this is going to work. And they're all saying, look, this is decades away. We're just, we're putting stuff together. Lexus is like, oh, we're showing safety features. It's just in the package of a self-driving car. Don't worry about it. But they're, you know, this is not anytime soon. Well, and how does it ever get done? Because it seems to me that like the- It's already happening, right? There's a handful of states, I think Nevada is one of them, where Google has just put its car on the road here. Right. But again, there are no laws here. Right. You can't just like drive to a brothel while drinking, you know, like it doesn't matter what you do here. That's why I love Las Vegas. Russell, I mean, what's your, what's your sense on the legality of the situation? I mean, is there action around the states at the federal level? I think there's a way to work it out. But I also think the concern is the reason I would want to buy a self-driving car is so I wouldn't have to drive and I wouldn't have to like pay attention. So I think the concern is you get, by the time you make a product, it's been so sort of pared back to deal with the legal things that people don't actually want to buy it. I guess. I mean, I would love to buy a self-driving car. That's kind of a depressing way to think about it. I would too. And I think, I think the answer for the industry is to say, look, this will make the roads actually safer. Yeah. And they've got to get there. They've got to prove to people that a high waste flow of self-driving cars will be safer than like my distracted cashel listening. Right. But they also have to somehow remove all liability from themselves or else they're never going to want to play the game. Right. Because if I'm, as long as I'm able to blame Lexus, Lexus is going to, yeah, we're all, we're going down. No, I agree with you. It's got to get mapped out, but we'll see how it goes. Yeah. All right. So we have, we have one more demo. Russell, thank you so much for talking to us. And I'm now kind of depressed about self-driving cars. They're awesome. I feel like I'm never going to get one. I'm only here to depress you. Thank you. Thank you both for that. Anytime. But so there's one more demo we have left. And I feel like I've said, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life, like 400 times this week. Yeah. But this might be the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. It's called the Artifon. And like, let's just, we have a video of it. We've played with it a little bit. So let's just start with that and we'll go from there. Hi, this is Rondo from The Verge. And we're here with the Artifon Instrument One and its inventor, Mike Butera. What this is, is actually an advanced MIDI controller with an iPhone for its brain. If you know how to play guitar, you can intuitively just start playing. And it has the fretboard down here with the strings, and then you strum on this touchpad down here, or you can finger pick. It has five different modes, guitar, bass, violin, banjo, and custom. The cool thing about that is if you know how to play guitar, you can have the guitar sound. And that's cool, but you can actually have it in guitar mode and then change the MIDI instrument to say a violin. You can change it to an organ. You can change it to a synthesizer, but then play it like you're playing a guitar. So because this is actually a MIDI controller, it can work with anything that has a MIDI input. So this works with GarageBand. This works for pretty much anything. And you can also play live with it. You can record with it. This can also use vocoder apps. So it has a microphone input. We're using force sensing technology on this for both the fingerboard and the strum section. So all in all, the Instrument 1 is unlike anything I've ever played, but at the same time exactly like everything I've ever played. It's expected to be $800 for presale this spring, and then other models on sale after that. So this fell pretty squarely into the realm of things that we saw and were like, we have to try immediately. So we actually brought Mike Butera into the studio with us with the Artifon. It's the Instrument 1. Is that the first instrument? Yeah, the first instrument. You have to see it in person. It's made of wood. It's beautiful. It's a very good African hardwood, sustainably harvested. We make it in Nashville. Right. I mean, it looks crazy. Yeah, so tell us, let's start with kind of the backstory of how you started the company and built this thing. Yeah, sure. So I have a PhD in sound studies, and my dissertation was on the way we listen phenomenologically with technology. So I teach that and sociology, and then I'm a musician, and I play multiple stringed instruments. So I wanted to make a device that changed the way that we approached instruments that wasn't just a guitar. And then we have apps. And so with MIDI, you can do all kinds of things, but if you're limited to a screen, you're basically non-tactile. So this came about. So you have it, this is a touch sensor? Yeah, these are force sensing resistors, actually, on the fretboard and the strum section. And so they measure the pressure and then translate that into various MIDI commands. You can do effects by pressing harder. You can do slides. You can turn off the frets and go between. You can do vibrato. So it's more expressive than the others. So you've developed this to be a huge number of instruments, right? You were playing around and there was a whole bunch of different things that you had in there. Yeah, so the idea is you can play it in a guitar. See, he has mad skills over here. This is amazing. Like a guitar or a mandolin or something like that, but then if you put it upright, you can use it like a harp or an upright bass or a cello. If you put it on your shoulder, I can show you. So we'll change the string mode and then this becomes like a bow. This is not fair. This is not fair. Right, so you can run any app, any iPhone app that takes MIDI. This is just a controller, right? Yeah, that's right. So we are programming the firmware and actually people can customize the firmware to make whatever instrument they want. So we made it this weird shape because it's ergonomic and it's portable. So in all these different positions, you have a reason even though it's an odd thing. Once you hold it, you're like, oh, yeah. This is part of the bigger story here, which is there are a lot of indie hardware projects here. Yeah, you're saying that. What's it like being an indie hardware developer, especially for a project that seems like you couldn't immediately explain this to someone? As soon as you see it, I think you get it. We've been doing this for two years and we kept it quiet for almost that long. We just unveiled basically today. And so we've gotten local angel funding in Nashville. I mean, Nashville is an amazing city for this, not only because of the tech scene, but the music scene and all that. So we've been able to get by and with a great team of engineers. These guys have built consoles, they're veterans of the industry. And so we just love the project. And that got us here. Now to go farther than that, I mean, a lot of people do the Kickstarter, Indiegogo thing. We're kind of going a middle ground of we want to get investors who care about the field because we're doing domestic production. We're not just shipping off to China and looking at the bottom line. This is about caring about not only the production process, but then when people hold it, like caring about your instrument. Yeah, yeah. You like love it. And the funny thing is by including your phone, which all these psychology studies saying people actually have love type emotions with their gadgets, you know this. We're kind of bridging that divide. Well, so I was actually going to ask that. So we've seen a lot of digital instruments. That's kind of been a thing for a while, but they're all sort of, they're all very much toys. Right, and then this feels a lot more like, oh my goodness. Yes, but this feels way more like an instrument. Like was that something you did on purpose? You're just going to, this is amazing. You're very talented. You get trolled by an electric banjo. No, it's great. It's great. No, it's good. Thank you. You are a music teacher. We're all very proud of you. Sorry. So I mean, this feels much more like a real instrument than just a toy for a toy. It's a toy for your iPhone so you can play guitar. Yeah, and that's, I mean, that's the big difference between, you know, a lot of the guitar hero type guitar controllers and this is, we're making this for professional musicians. I mean, from keyboardists who want to get out behind the keyboards to string players who want to expand their sounds to people who want to practice or write song right in multi-track recording on the bus. You know, there's a lot of uses and it connects. I mean, it connects with all your standard music gear. So are you finding that people want to make music using the iPhone as a central controller? We've been doing a lot of customer development in Nashville and elsewhere to figure out what people want, like, that would matter to them. And we've actually changed the design and continue to based on that feedback. A lot of musicians are saying that, you know, how does this fit? You got the Omnicord, that old sort of weird instrument and then you have weird, you know, keytars or synth guitars. And some people use an Omnicord as an almost kitsch thing now and people don't generally use other synth guitars, but by making it something that sort of fits your life a little better that you can actually carry around, that you can put your phone in. There's, it's more blended in, in that sense. So we, you know, that's what people are grabbing onto. They see it, they want it and then they're like, oh yeah, and it would be useful in this and this and this space. So studios want it, just, we met with a lot of studios in Nashville and they're like, hey, you know, we just want this laying around because at, you know, eight hours into a session when you're just out of ideas, you pick this up and you just mess and you see what happens. So can you play us a sweet demo here? Yeah. What do you want to? Because I've been trying. You're doing great. You're learning so fast. I think, yeah. So, yeah, you're very, see? You just fire me. I say nice things to you. Yeah, exactly. This is awesome. That's awesome. Can I have one? Yeah. There you go. I saw how that's supposed to work. All right, Mike, thank you so much. Yeah, that's awesome. That is our show. We, this is our last day in the studio. Sadly, they're taking all of this away from us, but we still have more coming. We have the Verge Mobile Show coming up today at five. We have a Vergecast at six, and our last Vergecast at CES is always really fun. So you should definitely hang out for that. There will probably be more tired Neelai, plus more tired everybody else, which is just amazing. But so stick around. We have a ton of great video content. We'll be around all night. And thanks so much for watching. Mike, will you play us out? Yeah. Do it loud. We need like a drum set now. Yeah. Do you have drums? You got drums. Drum solo to out. All right. This is the best drum solo. All right. All right. Thank you guys so much. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Happy CES. Bye, everybody.
 Hello and welcome to Top Shelf.
 This is our daily afternoon show about all the gadgets and gizmos and all the weird stuff
 we found at CES.
 And there's a lot of it.
 I was actually out on the show floor for like two and a half hours yesterday and it was
 the most exhausting thing I've ever done in my life, just trying to look at things.
 Here to talk about it all with me is my long lost co-host.
 I missed you yesterday.
 Neil Ipatel.
 Welcome back.
 You think you're so handsome.
 I just...
 And you're right.
 That's what you think, saying really nice things in a really threatening, ominous way.
 I like that.
 You did a good job.
 I kind of, I want to cry right now.
 I would like to cry.
 How are you?
 People.
 I'm very tired so I hope you're ready for a free form journey into my body.
 It was Kesha last night.
 Just ruined you forever.
 You didn't come down from Kesha until about ten minutes ago.
 Yeah, pretty much.
 Also I watched...
 The four minutes of Kesha.
 I watched Josh watch Blackjack.
 And then he was just, I don't know if that's something you want to...
 No, not feeling the Blackjack.
 And then you let Michael, Michael Shane won like $300.
 Yeah.
 Good for Michael Shane.
 Yeah.
 I have always lost thousands of dollars playing Blackjack.
 I don't think I've ever want to handle Blackjack in my life.
 That's a fun fact.
 One time our operations assistant, Leah, was there playing and she had this like, essentially
 like a bio computer of nerds behind her telling her exactly what to do.
 And she won $700 in four hands, like immediately.
 But it was only because of this like brain trust of nerds being like, I don't know, I
 have to do some calculations.
 Like Watson sitting behind you.
 Yeah, it was amazing.
 Everyone else was so mad.
 That's awesome.
 But then we took our money and we ran away.
 And then we spent the money at other places.
 And then they kicked you out and tried to beat you up.
 Then the casino.
 Now they're making a movie.
 It's a whole thing.
 And so anyway, there's lots of news to talk about.
 This is day, I don't know, day 50.
 How long have we been here?
 Like a thousand years.
 Yeah.
 But it's like the last full day of CES.
 Right.
 And it's our last show actually.
 It is.
 It's our last show.
 CES is kind of.
 I'm going to miss you.
 I'm going to miss you too.
 CES is kind of winding down.
 It's still, there's still, what is it?
 Like 160,000 people here.
 Yeah.
 But the actual news, the cool new stuff is all sort of out there.
 It's all been done.
 Yeah, we've seen it all.
 So what we're going to do is talk about some of the biggest things that happened and some
 of the bigger trends and cooler stuff.
 And there's actually a lot.
 You know, I think the biggest overarching trend here is the rise of the indie hardware
 startup and how many of them there are.
 A lot of them are funded by Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
 Adrian did a great report on that.
 Right.
 So a lot of the biggest stuff we saw this week wasn't from Samsung or Sony or Panasonic.
 They all had these big kind of, would you call them busts?
 I kind of want to call their press conferences busts where they were like, you know, big
 bombastic in their like 4k TVs.
 And like, that's cool, but nothing is really, you know, life changing, blowing my mind with
 possibilities.
 I keep comparing it.
 I don't know why this keeps coming up to me, but like two or three years ago there was
 a, Seuss was here and they put out like 500 concepts in the press conference.
 Yeah.
 It was exciting and weird.
 And it's like, who is this company?
 And like, what are they talking about?
 I literally don't know what you're talking about, but that phone looks cool.
 And that, there wasn't a lot of that this year.
 I think Samsung showed off like a curved display phone.
 Yeah.
 But it's really the little guys, some of whom aren't even on the show floor, who are here
 and they've all got really cool ideas.
 They're getting funding in a variety of like new ways basically.
 And they're, I think in Adrian's piece, the difference is she's like, Samsung and Sony,
 those guys, they look around the world at like what the manufacturing partners are doing.
 They're like, okay, that panel is ready and this chip is ready and now we're going to
 glue them together and that's our new smart phone.
 That's how Samsung and LG end up releasing the world's first OLED TV at exactly the same
 time.
 And the indie guys are basically saying, what do I want?
 And then they're building that and that's really different.
 But then there's another trend, which I think is really interesting, which is there are,
 there's a lot of robots in automation in the show.
 And Paul Miller, right?
 Yeah.
 Paul Miller, who's not on the internet.
 You may have heard of him.
 He's not on the internet.
 That's all I know about him.
 But he's standing outside.
 He is standing outside, not on the internet at this moment.
 That's very important.
 Paul, you went to iRobot, right?
 Yeah.
 Paul, you're a bolt not on the internet.
 Yeah.
 I went to iRobot, yes.
 We know we have heat on the internet.
 So tell us, what did you see at iRobot?
 What's iRobot up to now?
 Well so, they got a new pool cleaning robot, which is exciting.
 iRobot is doing exactly what iRobot has always done, which is they make these horribly boring,
 not even that great vacuum cleaners.
 Now pool cleaning robot.
 The Looch, which cleans your gutters.
 Oh my god.
 There's a new Looch out at this year's CES.
 Does it clean your gutters better?
 Yeah, better.
 Here's what I don't understand about iRobot.
 Let me just ask you this question.
 As far as I know, iRobot makes military robots that can kill you.
 No, they can't kill you.
 They make a line of domestic robots.
 Paul's saying they can't kill you.
 They can kill you.
 Fine.
 They can definitely kill you.
 They can drive around and identify who to kill, right?
 And then they make a line of extremely boring things that can clean various parts of your
 home.
 Do they make anything for consumers that is useful?
 I think is the question.
 Well, so for one, they are selling a ton of vacuum cleaners and they are making money.
 And that's what makes them kind of the most interesting, exciting, best robotics company
 in the world is because they make money and they are a real business.
 And for like Toyota and Honda show off these great concepts, but they never sell them to
 us.
 So iRobot makes these Roombas and then these military robots.
 But what they've been doing for years now is developing really great intellectual property.
 And for the past two CESs, they are showing off this thing called Ava and it's their mobility
 platform which can map out a space.
 It can navigate a space autonomously, avoid running into people.
 And it's finally mature enough that it's going into a product.
 It's the RP Vita, which is a hospital telepresence robot.
 And I got to play around with it.
 It's just dead simple.
 You've got like an iPad app, like a doctor would have an iPad app.
 They pull up like a list of hospital rooms basically, tap on the name of a room and the
 robot just drives there.
 And you really don't have to worry about it.
 It will map its own course.
 It will avoid running into people.
 So the top half of the robot is developed by In Touch Health, which they've been doing
 telepresence robots, but they're stationary before.
 So this is like a really great commercial application.
 Not for consumers.
 It's about like $5,000 a month to get one of these in a hospital.
 But to be honest, as far as healthcare costs and when you're talking about monitoring stroke
 victims and stuff, that's actually decently reasonable.
 And so, but again, iRobot is all about making this a sustainable business.
 They're going to make money on this.
 And the thing is that they've developed really great technology here and will continue to
 develop technology in this realm that will lead to eventually, Colin Angle, the CEO I
 talked to, said about 10 years for a personal home robot.
 And there's a lot of problems still.
 A home robot to be really useful is probably going to need an arm.
 It's probably going to need to be able to go up and down stairs.
 It's going to need a base that's not as large.
 So there's still a lot to figure out.
 It's going to need a laser weapon of some kind.
 But they're on the path.
 Yeah, laser weapon for sure.
 But there are a lot of developments lately that are getting closer.
 So here's my question.
 I went to LG's booth yesterday and they were like, we have an unprecedented new robot,
 robot vacuum.
 It's a square.
 Oh.
 And it's like, it's literally a square.
 And they're like, you've never seen a vacuum like this before.
 And you're like, that's true.
 I have not.
 It's like, this one's a square.
 I mean, like, are those companies a threat to iRobot?
 Do they represent actual competition to this company?
 And can somebody get this done in less than 10 years?
 That's my big question.
 And can somebody make something that isn't a vacuum cleaner?
 Right.
 Well, iRobot actually just bought another company.
 I think it's Evolution Robotics, which makes the Mint, which is square.
 The Mint is like a Swiffer robot.
 So you put a Swiffer pad on it.
 And it uses different technology for navigation.
 And so iRobot bought them for that product, which I think was a successful product.
 It's a little cheaper than iRobot's own products.
 But also intellectual property.
 I think there's sort of a race is on.
 And Colin Angle talks about how he sees a robot, like there being a robot butler.
 And you won't have to manage the little robots that are doing your little chores around the
 house.
 You'll engage with a robot butler.
 The thing is, is that we are engaging with robot butlers right now on our phones, like
 with Siri and Google Now.
 And Colin Angle admits iRobot is not in the business of developing that sort of artificial
 intelligence.
 They're in manipulation and navigation and that sort of stuff.
 So we might just be controlling our smart homes with our phones, like we saw at LG.
 You touch your phone through the washer and dryer.
 So there's a question if we'll have robots in our homes in that role that he wants.
 I still think there is a role for a robot in the home with an arm that can do stuff,
 pick stuff up, fold your laundry, make your bed.
 But we're still at least an order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude away from shipping
 something like that to consumers as far as price.
 Something that you would want in your home right now probably costs $100,000 to build.
 And you'd probably want to pay $1,000 to $2,000 for something like that ultimately.
 Cool Paul, thank you so much for talking to us.
 I just have to make it 10 years and then I get one of these things.
 Colin Angle says, you know, everybody always says 10 years, that's a robotics cliche.
 Oh, it'll be in 10 years and then it never happens.
 Colin Angle says he never says that.
 So he's really serious this time.
 10 years.
 10 years.
 I'm writing it down.
 What's the date?
 I don't know what the date is.
 10 years from this.
 May 10th, 2013.
 If I can't buy one, burning the building down.
 All of the buildings.
 Paul, thanks so much for joining us.
 Thanks guys.
 So do you want to roll, like I want to roll out really bad.
 I had a room but it was so broken that I didn't.
 My favorite thing that I've seen is the DJ Roombas where you just put a speaker on top
 of a Roomba.
 It's not an actual thing.
 You just put a speaker on top of a Roomba and it just goes around playing music.
 I could get into that.
 That seems amazing.
 I mean, but that's not even a Roomba, that's just a speaker that doesn't, that like bumps
 into things hilariously.
 I don't know, you say that like it's not the greatest thing in the world.
 Fair, fine.
 So one of the other things we've seen a lot of is like different ways.
 Don't you dare contradict me.
 I'll go, I'm sorry.
 One of the other things we've seen a lot of is like different ways to interact with gadgets.
 That's one of the big things is like how do we use our stuff?
 And even robots kind of play into that.
 It's like, you know, how we interface with this whole world around us.
 And there's a lot of it here.
 Everything here is, I mean, it's kind of like there's a sense.
 I know we have some video and some stuff to look at, but there's a sense where it's like
 3D was, where the TV manufacturers sold everybody an HDTV and they're like, man, we got to come
 up with something else like that.
 And like what they sell on is 3D.
 It's like everybody else is looking at Microsoft selling the Kinect and they're like, we need
 something like that.
 And they don't, I'm not convinced that everybody has all the parts like Microsoft had with
 the Kinect.
 Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is it was when we were talking about the Pebble watch yesterday,
 Dieter said something I thought was really smart and he was saying, there's not a lot
 of bells and whistles, but like if you don't have all the bells, you can make better whistles.
 And I feel like that's what Kinect did.
 It's like this really basic thing that they did really, really well.
 And all these other things are really cool.
 And you know, you see the possibility for like, Leap Motion blew my mind.
 Really?
 I haven't heard of it.
 It was still like it just the fact that it could recognize all of my fingers and then
 I could put a pencil in between my fingers and it would recognize that that was different
 from the finger that I, it just was crazy.
 And so there's all this stuff that you can do, but it seems like, what are you going
 to do with it?
 Right.
 It's like a fun novelty.
 Right.
 And so Russell Brandom wrote a really great report on, it's actually interesting.
 All those companies are here, but they're not really talking to consumers.
 They have like little offices where like Sony and Samsung and Microsoft, they're all going
 to meet with them and see what they can do.
 And you know, Intel has a big push for what they're calling perceptual computing.
 I mean, it's, again, like to me, there's, I have a definite sense that like everyone
 like woke up to touch and what Microsoft's doing with the Kinect, with natural user interface
 there.
 And there's a big rush to like try it out and see what their version of HD will be.
 And I think there's going to be a lot of fallout.
 So one that we did get to try out was the Tobii eye tracker, which is another pretty
 wacky thing and Tom Warren got to play with it.
 So let's check that out.
 Hey guys, this is Tom Warren from The Verge and we're looking at Tobii's Rex eye tracking
 technology for Windows 8.
 So rather a one time calibration, you basically hold down the delete key and then you can
 navigate across the whole interface.
 So this is working on Windows 8 now.
 So you can see that I've got my hand on the delete key here.
 If I look at mail and then I hit delete, it'll launch mail.
 Now I can go and look at the Microsoft account team email on there and then hit delete again
 and it'll navigate to that.
 So you're basically using your eyes to track where you want the cursor to be and then the
 delete key will actually trigger that action.
 So I can start a new email if I look at the plus at the top right and there's all sorts
 of other ways as well.
 If we go into the maps application, you can actually use the scroll wheel on the mouse
 to zoom in.
 So if I look at Toronto and then I start zooming in and out, it will do that navigation for
 you and then I can look to Pittsburgh in the very left there and I can scroll in and out
 as well.
 If we go back and then we go to Internet Explorer, you can use the insert key and if I hold that
 down and then look to the bottom of the page, it'll start scrolling and if I look to the
 top, it'll start scrolling to the top.
 So we saw this last year and Toby are going to be shipping this to consumers later on
 in the year.
 It seems like it's a lot more accurate than it was before.
 If I go and look at people, it seems to be working quite well when I look at the desktop.
 That's Toby's Rex eye tracking technology for Windows 8.
 I feel like all I want to do with that is stand behind people as they use computers
 and just stare at things while they click and just wait and see what happens.
 And that's...
 Does it get confused?
 I don't know.
 That stuff is like, that's great, but is it useful?
 Do you care?
 Is there really buy one of those?
 Yeah, I don't know how much, like, is it that much more work?
 So anyway, the thing I think is the coolest of all of these wacky things that we've done
 is...
 And I had an interesting combination of robotics and UI.
 And yeah, is self-driving cars.
 It's Chris Ziegler.
 Yeah, it's Chris Ziegler.
 So Chris showed up to CES, basically got off the plane and just disappeared for like days
 and days and days.
 Gone.
 You were like, I have to go hang out somewhere.
 I assumed you were dead or gambling or those.
 Just those.
 Those are the only two things.
 What concerns me is that you assumed I was dead and you didn't think to do anything about
 it.
 I mean, I figured we had work to do.
 You were busy gambling.
 Yeah.
 Busy gambling.
 I gambled in your honor.
 I poured one out for you.
 I appreciate that.
 I appreciate that.
 So what were you actually doing?
 So I was deeply embedded in the world of auto journalism, which is a very foreign thing
 for us.
 But no, it was great.
 I checked out, Lexus had a self-driving car here that they didn't actually demo, but they've
 been demonstrating it privately in both Japan and in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is where
 Trina is located, which is their research arm.
 They've been doing that for the past five years and they just showed it for the first
 time publicly here.
 And then we checked out Audi, which eventually they're going to get to true self-driving
 cars, but in the short term they're doing what they're calling a self-parking car.
 It's basically you walk outside your hotel, you press a button on your smartphone and
 the car creeps around the corner at 2.1 miles an hour or something.
 Which for the record is just astonishingly slow.
 Yes.
 Right, but it's awesome.
 The video you guys made is awesome.
 Yeah, it's, I mean, it's-
 Can you say shields?
 Shields.
 You could, but I wouldn't, if you said shields, I still wouldn't go into an area with gunfire.
 I wouldn't do it.
 That's the best in Batman, the first Batman.
 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
 When the Batmobile-
 He's like racing at him and he just walks out there and he's like, stop.
 I love that this happened to this movie, but why would anyone do that?
 Right.
 So I would definitely, if I was like the first guy on my block with that feature, I would
 definitely talk into the phone like I was talking to the car remotely and then everyone
 would just assume.
 And then it would slowly creep up at you.
 At 2.1 miles per hour.
 It's super creepy the first time it happens, when the car just appears around the corner
 and there's no one in it.
 It's weird.
 So yeah, that's what I was doing this week.
 And so all these companies are making a big deal out of, this is the future, this is the
 craziest thing that's ever happened in the world.
 So Ford's CTO, Paul Mascarenas, who we actually talked to this week, said last year that Google
 has kind of pushed the entire industry in the direction of self-driving cars.
 They forced the issue and everyone is having to respond.
 For Google, it's just a means to an end.
 Google doesn't seem that interested in selling me a self-driving car, but everybody else
 kind of caught on to the idea and is now doing it themselves.
 I think Google is doing it because they can.
 Would you buy a Google car?
 Google does everything because they can.
 Would you buy a Google car?
 Like if Google made a car, would you buy it?
 No.
 You wouldn't?
 I mean, too many ads in your face.
 It's not that.
 It's like Google makes a car.
 Like what are Verizon and Samsung going to do to it first?
 That's true.
 Google now would be sweet though.
 What kind of spot should I do?
 It's going to be in my car.
 Droid car 2.
 You'd open the car and it would make like a droplet sound.
 No, I mean, you know.
 Does it have LTE?
 Actually the Audi does have LTE.
 Before they were doing HSPA and they just upgraded LTE.
 So that's neither here nor there.
 So they're going to get to self-driving cars eventually, but the problem is that they're
 very careful in the language that they use to describe these vehicles because they know
 that there's this looming legislative battle around getting these things legalized.
 So they're being very careful not to call them autonomous cars, not to say that they
 drive themselves.
 They're like, oh, it's a safety feature.
 We're helping the driver.
 And it was really interesting to hear the very, very careful language that every single
 executive used to describe what they're trying to do here.
 Let me ask you the real question.
 It's not whether I'm going to buy a Google car.
 It's whether this technology, it's not even whether it's legalized.
 If there's demand for it, if people want it, the legal stuff will get sorted out.
 Maybe it'll be a little bit slower than we'd like, but it will definitely get sorted out.
 But without the demand, there's no reason for Congress to spend its time talking about
 self-driving cars, right?
 That's true, but I would also argue that there are many things that people want that aren't
 legal.
 I mean...
 That's fair.
 Yeah.
 Well, so actually, I mean, let's talk about some of this legal stuff because it's like
 we're not going to get anywhere until we figure this out, right?
 And so Russell Brandom, who's been a busy guy this week, has been out, has written some
 stuff on us, for us about this before, and is actually here in a totally different place
 from where Paul was a few minutes ago, just to be very clear about that.
 But so Russell, tell us a little bit about some of the big legal issues that are going
 on here.
 Yeah.
 I mean, the main thing is all the laws are written as if there's a driver in the car.
 So there are all these things the driver has to be that autonomous drivers aren't going
 to be.
 They aren't going to be, you know, conscious, and they're going to be in control of the
 car, but it's sort of not...
 It's just hard to make those laws work with essentially a robot driver.
 Like how do you give it an eye test?
 How do you do sort of any of the things people do to get driver's licenses?
 Well, it seems to me that the bigger problem is, I mean, you could, I'm sure you could
 develop a certification program for robot cars, but our laws are punitive.
 When you make a mistake, we punish you.
 Right.
 And it's like, how do you punish a robot driver for making the wrong decision?
 You can just be like, what?
 I was sitting in the passenger seat.
 It's like, your robot blew the stop sign.
 Like, bad robot.
 So what's the situation with that stuff?
 Well, the concern is that you sue the person who made the robot driver, right?
 So if it was, you know, if it was this...
 This is why I think companies like Lexus are being so careful is because they don't want
 me to say, oh, I thought the Lexus was going to sort of drive for me and it would be fine.
 And if you get in that paradigm, then anything it does, Lexus could potentially be liable
 for.
 So you sort of don't know until people start suing each other, but it's also, you know,
 a $50 billion, like auto liability lawsuits are $50 billion a year.
 It's huge.
 And so there's really, it's kind of a dangerous pool to wade into.
 I don't know.
 I would just blame the robot.
 I'm sure.
 Look, what we need to do is develop robots that have feelings.
 And then you can blame them.
 Right.
 And then you can blame them and they'll feel bad about what they've done.
 I mean, that's actually, I think the most interesting of all the robot stuff.
 Like no one worries about the legal implications of a vacuum cleaner that can like bounce around
 your house.
 Once you put things in like a two ton car and say, don't worry about it, the robot,
 it'll take care of it.
 And they're very careful to not call them robots, right?
 Right.
 Actually the head of Audi's R&D lab, Wolfgang Durrheimer said that we are not out to compete
 with the robot industry.
 Which I thought was a very interesting way of putting it.
 Check out this robot we built.
 Yeah.
 Check out this robot.
 Yeah, it's going to be many, many years until they figure out exactly how this is going
 to work.
 And they're all saying, look, this is decades away.
 We're just, we're putting stuff together.
 Lexus is like, oh, we're showing safety features.
 It's just in the package of a self-driving car.
 Don't worry about it.
 But they're, you know, this is not anytime soon.
 Well, and how does it ever get done?
 Because it seems to me that like the- It's already happening, right?
 There's a handful of states, I think Nevada is one of them, where Google has just put
 its car on the road here.
 Right.
 But again, there are no laws here.
 Right.
 You can't just like drive to a brothel while drinking, you know, like it doesn't matter
 what you do here.
 That's why I love Las Vegas.
 Russell, I mean, what's your, what's your sense on the legality of the situation?
 I mean, is there action around the states at the federal level?
 I think there's a way to work it out.
 But I also think the concern is the reason I would want to buy a self-driving car is
 so I wouldn't have to drive and I wouldn't have to like pay attention.
 So I think the concern is you get, by the time you make a product, it's been so sort
 of pared back to deal with the legal things that people don't actually want to buy it.
 I guess.
 I mean, I would love to buy a self-driving car.
 That's kind of a depressing way to think about it.
 I would too.
 And I think, I think the answer for the industry is to say, look, this will make the roads
 actually safer.
 Yeah.
 And they've got to get there.
 They've got to prove to people that a high waste flow of self-driving cars will be safer
 than like my distracted cashel listening.
 Right.
 But they also have to somehow remove all liability from themselves or else they're never going
 to want to play the game.
 Right.
 Because if I'm, as long as I'm able to blame Lexus, Lexus is going to, yeah, we're all,
 we're going down.
 No, I agree with you.
 It's got to get mapped out, but we'll see how it goes.
 Yeah.
 All right.
 So we have, we have one more demo.
 Russell, thank you so much for talking to us.
 And I'm now kind of depressed about self-driving cars.
 They're awesome.
 I feel like I'm never going to get one.
 I'm only here to depress you.
 Thank you.
 Thank you both for that.
 Anytime.
 But so there's one more demo we have left.
 And I feel like I've said, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life, like
 400 times this week.
 Yeah.
 But this might be the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.
 It's called the Artifon.
 And like, let's just, we have a video of it.
 We've played with it a little bit.
 So let's just start with that and we'll go from there.
 Hi, this is Rondo from The Verge.
 And we're here with the Artifon Instrument One and its inventor, Mike Butera.
 What this is, is actually an advanced MIDI controller with an iPhone for its brain.
 If you know how to play guitar, you can intuitively just start playing.
 And it has the fretboard down here with the strings, and then you strum on this touchpad
 down here, or you can finger pick.
 It has five different modes, guitar, bass, violin, banjo, and custom.
 The cool thing about that is if you know how to play guitar, you can have the guitar sound.
 And that's cool, but you can actually have it in guitar mode and then change the MIDI
 instrument to say a violin.
 You can change it to an organ.
 You can change it to a synthesizer, but then play it like you're playing a guitar.
 So because this is actually a MIDI controller, it can work with anything that has a MIDI
 input.
 So this works with GarageBand.
 This works for pretty much anything.
 And you can also play live with it.
 You can record with it.
 This can also use vocoder apps.
 So it has a microphone input.
 We're using force sensing technology on this for both the fingerboard and the strum section.
 So all in all, the Instrument 1 is unlike anything I've ever played, but at the same
 time exactly like everything I've ever played.
 It's expected to be $800 for presale this spring, and then other models on sale after
 that.
 So this fell pretty squarely into the realm of things that we saw and were like, we have
 to try immediately.
 So we actually brought Mike Butera into the studio with us with the Artifon.
 It's the Instrument 1.
 Is that the first instrument?
 Yeah, the first instrument.
 You have to see it in person.
 It's made of wood.
 It's beautiful.
 It's a very good African hardwood, sustainably harvested.
 We make it in Nashville.
 Right.
 I mean, it looks crazy.
 Yeah, so tell us, let's start with kind of the backstory of how you started the company
 and built this thing.
 Yeah, sure.
 So I have a PhD in sound studies, and my dissertation was on the way we listen phenomenologically
 with technology.
 So I teach that and sociology, and then I'm a musician, and I play multiple stringed instruments.
 So I wanted to make a device that changed the way that we approached instruments that
 wasn't just a guitar.
 And then we have apps.
 And so with MIDI, you can do all kinds of things, but if you're limited to a screen,
 you're basically non-tactile.
 So this came about.
 So you have it, this is a touch sensor?
 Yeah, these are force sensing resistors, actually, on the fretboard and the strum section.
 And so they measure the pressure and then translate that into various MIDI commands.
 You can do effects by pressing harder.
 You can do slides.
 You can turn off the frets and go between.
 You can do vibrato.
 So it's more expressive than the others.
 So you've developed this to be a huge number of instruments, right?
 You were playing around and there was a whole bunch of different things that you had in
 there.
 Yeah, so the idea is you can play it in a guitar.
 See, he has mad skills over here.
 This is amazing.
 Like a guitar or a mandolin or something like that, but then if you put it upright, you
 can use it like a harp or an upright bass or a cello.
 If you put it on your shoulder, I can show you.
 So we'll change the string mode and then this becomes like a bow.
 This is not fair.
 This is not fair.
 Right, so you can run any app, any iPhone app that takes MIDI.
 This is just a controller, right?
 Yeah, that's right.
 So we are programming the firmware and actually people can customize the firmware to make
 whatever instrument they want.
 So we made it this weird shape because it's ergonomic and it's portable.
 So in all these different positions, you have a reason even though it's an odd thing.
 Once you hold it, you're like, oh, yeah.
 This is part of the bigger story here, which is there are a lot of indie hardware projects
 here.
 Yeah, you're saying that.
 What's it like being an indie hardware developer, especially for a project that seems like you
 couldn't immediately explain this to someone?
 As soon as you see it, I think you get it.
 We've been doing this for two years and we kept it quiet for almost that long.
 We just unveiled basically today.
 And so we've gotten local angel funding in Nashville.
 I mean, Nashville is an amazing city for this, not only because of the tech scene, but the
 music scene and all that.
 So we've been able to get by and with a great team of engineers.
 These guys have built consoles, they're veterans of the industry.
 And so we just love the project.
 And that got us here.
 Now to go farther than that, I mean, a lot of people do the Kickstarter, Indiegogo thing.
 We're kind of going a middle ground of we want to get investors who care about the field
 because we're doing domestic production.
 We're not just shipping off to China and looking at the bottom line.
 This is about caring about not only the production process, but then when people hold it, like
 caring about your instrument.
 Yeah, yeah.
 You like love it.
 And the funny thing is by including your phone, which all these psychology studies saying
 people actually have love type emotions with their gadgets, you know this.
 We're kind of bridging that divide.
 Well, so I was actually going to ask that.
 So we've seen a lot of digital instruments.
 That's kind of been a thing for a while, but they're all sort of, they're all very much
 toys.
 Right, and then this feels a lot more like, oh my goodness.
 Yes, but this feels way more like an instrument.
 Like was that something you did on purpose?
 You're just going to, this is amazing.
 You're very talented.
 You get trolled by an electric banjo.
 No, it's great.
 It's great.
 No, it's good.
 Thank you.
 You are a music teacher.
 We're all very proud of you.
 Sorry.
 So I mean, this feels much more like a real instrument than just a toy for a toy.
 It's a toy for your iPhone so you can play guitar.
 Yeah, and that's, I mean, that's the big difference between, you know, a lot of the guitar hero
 type guitar controllers and this is, we're making this for professional musicians.
 I mean, from keyboardists who want to get out behind the keyboards to string players
 who want to expand their sounds to people who want to practice or write song right in
 multi-track recording on the bus.
 You know, there's a lot of uses and it connects.
 I mean, it connects with all your standard music gear.
 So are you finding that people want to make music using the iPhone as a central controller?
 We've been doing a lot of customer development in Nashville and elsewhere to figure out what
 people want, like, that would matter to them.
 And we've actually changed the design and continue to based on that feedback.
 A lot of musicians are saying that, you know, how does this fit?
 You got the Omnicord, that old sort of weird instrument and then you have weird, you know,
 keytars or synth guitars.
 And some people use an Omnicord as an almost kitsch thing now and people don't generally
 use other synth guitars, but by making it something that sort of fits your life a little
 better that you can actually carry around, that you can put your phone in.
 There's, it's more blended in, in that sense.
 So we, you know, that's what people are grabbing onto.
 They see it, they want it and then they're like, oh yeah, and it would be useful in this
 and this and this space.
 So studios want it, just, we met with a lot of studios in Nashville and they're like,
 hey, you know, we just want this laying around because at, you know, eight hours into a session
 when you're just out of ideas, you pick this up and you just mess and you see what happens.
 So can you play us a sweet demo here?
 Yeah.
 What do you want to?
 Because I've been trying.
 You're doing great.
 You're learning so fast.
 I think, yeah.
 So, yeah, you're very, see?
 You just fire me.
 I say nice things to you.
 Yeah, exactly.
 This is awesome.
 That's awesome.
 Can I have one?
 Yeah.
 There you go.
 I saw how that's supposed to work.
 All right, Mike, thank you so much.
 Yeah, that's awesome.
 That is our show.
 We, this is our last day in the studio.
 Sadly, they're taking all of this away from us, but we still have more coming.
 We have the Verge Mobile Show coming up today at five.
 We have a Vergecast at six, and our last Vergecast at CES is always really fun.
 So you should definitely hang out for that.
 There will probably be more tired Neelai, plus more tired everybody else, which is just
 amazing.
 But so stick around.
 We have a ton of great video content.
 We'll be around all night.
 And thanks so much for watching.
 Mike, will you play us out?
 Yeah.
 Do it loud.
 We need like a drum set now.
 Yeah.
 Do you have drums?
 You got drums.
 Drum solo to out.
 All right.
 This is the best drum solo.
 All right.
 All right.
 Thank you guys so much.
 Bye, everybody.
 Bye, everybody.
 Happy CES.
 Bye, everybody.