 Vals Gabe Newell wants to sense your body and he's making a steam box. This is First. I'm Josh Tupolsky. I'm Ross Miller and this is day two of the show floor. Day three of CES. Of First. No. Day two of CES. Yes. Day three of First. Day six or seven of us. I've lost count of how long I've been in Las Vegas, but what I do know is I'm now an escort. So, you know, it's all really working out pretty well. You must have had a late night then. I had a number of late nights due to my new job as a female escort. Did I mention it was also a female escort? I mean, female. You know, let's not get bogged down in the details. So basically you're a female pretending to be a male pretending to be a female escort. Something like that. I mean, I don't know. I think it's in the movie. Everybody seems to enjoy it. That's the important thing. Everybody's happy to get to work. Point is we're exhausted. Everybody's having a good time. We're very tired. This is day two of the show floor being open. We have been here for quite a while covering the show. Yesterday was a massive day for us. Our biggest day I think yet with a ton of stuff, funny stuff, weird stuff. It's been very surprising how much fun I've been having in CES. I have to say, I mean, you know, I am not, I really, I try not to sound like I'm cheerleading CES because I think normally we come here and we're, you know, we see this as a mission we've got to get through. We have a really good time with our team. This year everybody was saying, oh, it's going to be a bad show and things are going to be terrible and it's, you know, hardware is dead. And I actually think it's been a really fun, amazing year so far. I think we've been looking at this show different than from years past. It's just we're looking for the weird more than we are. Like, we're not looking at Browder's anymore. We're years past that. Yeah, I just think that, I think you get that, you know, I think just in general the public gets Sony's going to talk about 4K TV or whatever and there's going to be, you're going to get the press stuff, the regular press stuff and then you've got to find the other stories that are interesting here. And I think, I think we've been doing that and that's really interesting to me. But, and we'll get to that and we'll get to Valve. And we will, sorry, yeah, we're going to talk about Valve in just a little bit, but we've got some headlines. We've got headlines. The first thing, yesterday T-Mobile made a huge push for its carriers. Really wanted to get past number four. It made a, a bunch of big announcements. First and foremost, LT. It'll be its first market is here next week. Yeah. A hundred million people by middle of this year. Yeah. Is that, is that, that, that, that LT is going to be interoperable with AT&T? I don't think so. What's, do we know? I don't think we know, but I think. Why are they doing this? They're just making a new version. Wait, wait, wait, why are they doing this? I mean, you know, it's just, I know why they're doing it. I just think it's the worst. Like, can we intervene here? It's all the same LTE. Can we make the right, can we correct our mistakes? It's all the same LTE like it's all the same 4G. Well, no, but you know, Verizon had either CDMA and there's GSM, right? Right. But now we don't have that problem. The LTE is like different bands, different spectrums. It's, it's all over the place. Okay, fine. Point is, no, you can't have this beautiful hippie dream world of yours. HD voice. HD voice is now HD voice compatible if you have a Galaxy S3 or the One S, you can start using it. Yeah. I still have never used HD voice. Chris, Chris Ziegler says that it is an incredible innovation that we just can't appreciate yet. How often do you, I just don't make phone calls anymore. I do everything I can to avoid phone calls. I don't like talking to people. If there's any way I can get out of talking on the phone, I will use that technique. Faking my own death, holding someone hostage saying, you know, I can't come to the phone because I'm in a hostage situation. I don't even know. I don't know what that would be. Why would you take, why would you hold somebody hostage if you just wanted to avoid a phone call? I mean, it seems like there are easier ways to get out of it. It's like, look, I want to, I want to talk to you about your, your hostage situation, but you need to join this group. That's right. And the last thing I did was unlimited data, completely unlimited data without contracts, starting at $70 a month. Yeah. The big thing of course is you don't get a subsidized phone, but T-Mobile has been doing a great job, not doing like half the new customers were contract free from the, some of the newer plans they've been doing. I mean, T-Mobile is really pushing them. It's like, we're the new unique carrier. You don't want a contract. You want unlimited data. These are the buzzwords we always talk about wanting. I actually find these announcements relatively boring. Can I be honest? Based on what we've been seeing here, this to me is one of the least interesting things. I mean, this, it just does not, it just kind of does nothing for me. Okay. It's the, in fact, I feel dead. That was, that, that news didn't want to go away. Boomerang. Either you're bad at throwing those or you really got to chuck them towards the camera. I think it's a little bit of both. No. All right. This is going to bore you just as much. We're going to get through it. It's the Wall Street Journal Digitimes and Bloomberg trifecta of rumors, cheap iPhone. Okay. So here's what I think is interesting. Okay. First off, they say they could be a cheaper iPhone with a polycarbonate body. It might be, you know, some new material that's easier to produce, cheaper and easier to produce. They'll call it something new, but it's, they'll call it something new, but it'll essentially be an iPhone 4S. Oh, polycarbonate. Yeah. They'll call it, you know, Apple, Apple carbonate. I, I, I carbonate. Yeah. But, so what I think is interesting about this is that historically for us, Apple has disrupted CES with, with news and, and no, you know, and this is, they do this, they love to do this. They, they have, there's something that happens somehow, you know, this, somehow this got leaked to the Wall Street Journal. You know, we don't know how they have very reliable sources. They've all, they're pretty much, they don't publish an Apple rumor unless it turns in. It turns out to be true. But you know, they always disrupt the show with news. What I thought was interesting is that yesterday on our site, this news hit and I looked at our traffic and it was the seventh most traffic post at prime time during the news, which I think is kind of incredible when you think about Apple's presence in the industry and that everybody said this show was going to be dead. And when I looked at our front page, what was trending was actual news from, from the show. I agree, but let me play a little bit devil's advocate. Please don't. Had, too bad. Had Apple done a special event announcement like they do every year in scripts. Totally different. That would have changed everything. Totally different. I mean, had they said we're doing, we're holding an event, please join us, tune in. If it had been like tune in, this show would have been over in one second because everybody would have started working on their editorials about Apple's TV initiative. What I also thought was interesting is that the phone itself is whatever. Apple's going to make a cheaper iPhone. I think that's great. I think the more, the more, the more we can get great smartphones in the hands of the people, the better off we'll all be. But what I thought was really interesting was this rumor happened and then 15 minutes later, Facebook issued an invite to an event. Right. And I have, I strongly feel that they must have been waiting to see if Apple was going to do an event and they were like, well, they're not doing it. Let's, let's do it. It's a CS tradition that Apple will screw it up somehow with an announcement. This time they did not. This was a, this was a spike. Right. A little disrupt, disrupt, disruptive spike, but it wasn't a, it didn't obliterate the show. Right. But Facebook is building something new. Facebook obliterated the show. We'll find that later. They managed to like everything. I don't know what that means. That's not even funny. Let's move on. All right. Let's pretend that never happened. The last, last story before we kind of get to the bigger things. This is actually, I think this kind of fell under the radar. Huawei is, I can't believe we're talking about Huawei. We are talking about Huawei because the one, didn't we talk about Huawei yesterday? We talked about the device. We have a, we actually have Sam Baffert out here. He spoke with the head of consumer electronics, Richard Yu, who had quite a few interesting things to say. Yeah. Let's, let's talk to Sam. Sam, are you with us? Hey, yeah, I'm here. Hey Sam. Hey Sam. Sam, you, you met with the, he's the CEO of Huawei. He is the head of consumer electronics. Head of consumer electronics at Huawei because they also do a heavy industry, I would assume. Yes. They're a Chinese company. Can you tell me a little bit about, about what you guys talked about? Yes. When you were chatting? So, I mean, the news here is. You might want to hold that mic a little bit closer to your mouth. Sure. How's this? Much better. It's a lot better. So the thing here is he, he was very bullish and confident. He was trying to convince me that Huawei makes the best phones in the world. He called out Samsung, he called out Apple and he was telling me that basically the new phones that they announced yesterday, the Ascend Mate and the D2, they are the best phones in the world. And what's interesting there is that until now the company has been very much, it sells a lot of phones, but not in the high end at all. I mean, I don't know about you guys. The only guy I know with a Huawei phone is Paul Miller and that's because he doesn't use the internet. So. Yeah. I mean, that's, that, that what you just said is 100% accurate. Right. Medically accurate. But I, I'm just wondering what do you get? I mean, you use the phones, right? You saw them. Do you feel that he has the stuff to back up his, his talk? Does he, do they make the best phones? Are they better than Samsung phones? I mean, so the Ascend Mate has a 6.1 inch screen, right? It's not going to be the, it's certainly not going to be the best phone for everyone in the world. Anyone with pockets, for example. But I mean, it's the quality I would say is from what I, from what I used, it seems like comparable to a Samsung phone or something. It's they're plastic-y. They're not, they're not like super, super high end, but they feel pretty good. They don't flex or anything. And I mean, the real issue is they're not going to be sold in the US. And. That's because the US perceives Huawei as a potential spy threat. Well, this is the thing. He says that. I'm not making that up. I'm not just being racist or something. That's, that's the, the, there's some concern that they are going to infiltrate the United States. No, and he, there's been potential investigation. He absolutely said that. And he said, he said that US carriers, he'd spoken with them. They're trying to build a relationship and carriers actually like Huawei's products, but he says that there is influence from the US government and that there are trust issues and they need to work. They really need to sort of work hard to get Huawei as an accepted brand, as a trusted company in the US. Do you, what do you make of his Steve Jobs comment? I mean, the Steve Jobs comment, he, so the actual comment, he said, Steve Jobs is gone. Now there is a lack of innovation. And I mean, basically he's trying to put the phones in the same conversation as Apple. I mean, right. I mean, is he trying to draw, he's saying, and thank God we're, Huawei is here to deliver the kind of innovation that Steve Jobs would have delivered. Well, like a 6.1 inch phone. Exactly. I mean, Tim Cook is clearly incapable of delivering a 6.1 inch phone. What is their skin called? What is the name of their skin? Emotion UI. Emotion UI. Did you feel moved by it? I was not moved. I will say one, one thing that I thought was a great idea. You have this 6.1 inch phone, but there's like a one handed mode. So they, they shrink the keyboard down and they shrink the keypad down to sort of go into the bottom left or the bottom right corner. So you can actually use this gigantic phone in one hand fairly comfortably. I mean, it's still, you certainly can't cover the whole screen with your thumb like you can with an iPhone, for example. But it's a pretty thoughtful innovation. They've clearly thought, it's not like Samsung, for example, who just, like they release the Galaxy Note, they blow up the Android UI to a huge screen. Huawei has actually thought about how people might use this device and I was quite impressed with that. So it sounds like we've got at least one new Huawei fan in the world, Sam. Yes, well, I'm a con-vet. What can I say? Yeah. All right, well, we've got to move on, but Sam, thanks for joining us. Did you, was there anything that you had there? No, that's about it. Sam, thanks for joining us and we'll see you later in the trailer for cocktails. Thanks a lot. What I find interesting, this is, well, the historical thing. I feel like Huawei could be at the point where HTC was years and years ago. No, absolutely. They're just about to push it. No, I agree with you 100%. I just think that what I've seen of their products, there's nothing notable about their products. They feel completely anonymous. HTC actually had started pushing a really interesting and aggressive and different industrial design. They started doing something that made you go, wait a second, whoa, these guys are making really nice phones. They started doing Sense when, before there was really an idea of, I mean, they'd been doing Sense, it was originally called, what was it called? I don't remember. It had a different name. Anyhow, the point is maybe it was just called Sense. They were doing Skinning on Windows Mobile and they brought that to Android. That was really the start of this whole Skinning fad, Skinning trend. I think they had some real stuff to bring to the table. Huawei is just a me too. They're like, oh, you did a big phone? We did a big phone. You guys have a, it's got pen input? We have a pen input. You're going to do Windows phone? We've got a Windows phone. It's just so interesting when these companies, they're big companies and make a lot of money. HTC was one of those, they were doing phones for other people, really kind of cow-town where their carriers wanted and get the branding. But now Huawei wants to be its own company, wants to have its brand in front. No matter how big they are, that's a huge struggle. It's funny, they can't do it. I got to tell you, Huawei's got an uphill battle with that name in America. If we still are unsure, if we still are messing it up, average Americans are not going to, that's just a nightmare. They just need to change the name to a W or something. All right, well, we should move on. I'm going to try this card one more time. There we go. That was not bad. That was a straight shot. Straight toward Michael Shane's head. It almost took off Michael's face, almost took off his eyes. Hey, buddy, I've got plenty more of these. Just watch it. What else? Anyway, we're going to get that. This is a cool report from yesterday. Chris Ziegler risked life and limb to let a car park itself while he sat in the passenger seat crying. This is awesome. This to me is really futuristic. So much the future. Yeah, check out this video, Chris Ziegler and Audi. When we come back, Chris Grant. Nice. Yes. This is Chris Ziegler with The Verge, and I am in the passenger seat of this car. I'm not driving. Why not? Because it's Audi's self-driving car. You'll notice that there's nobody in the driver's seat. We're about to go on a wild ride through the parking garage of the Mandarin Oriental. Got some sensors set up around here. These are laser scanners that help the car figure out where to go, and then it goes on a short path, maybe a hundred, 150 feet out to the front. We get out, then the car turns around. That part has to be done by hand with a real driver. And then we drive back in and the car backs into the spot. It's a little scary. This is our robot overlord future in action. It's happening right here in Las Vegas. I'm a little terrified. Let's see how this goes. So, it's slow. This is not like a Google car. This is not like the car that Lexus introduced yesterday. This is going five miles an hour through a preset course. Audi plans on getting there. They want to get to a full, like, highway experience. In fact, they're only the second automaker to have permission in the state of Nevada to drive on highways with self-driving cars. But this is not that. This is just to help you park the car without having to be in it. Imagine you're at a mall, you're at some sort of shopping center, pull out your smartphone, hit a button, the car comes and picks you up. That's what this is. So, it's pretty awesome. I'm not going to lie. For the time being, I'm okay driving the car myself. Parking really isn't that big of a deal. But, you know, if I have to pay another 100, 200 bucks to get this feature on my next car, I might do it. Audi's thinking 10 years out for this. So, we'll see how that goes. All right, Audi. Let's go back to the convention center. And we're back with Chris Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon.com and world-renowned hip-hop dancer. Look it up. That's crazy. Before we get into talking about valve and theme and steam and valve, can they come up with some other less mechanical? It's fine. It's their thing. What were you just saying about the auto parking? The auto auto parking. All this effort, you see a lot of times these cars that can auto park or parallel park. It's like just learn to parallel park. This car can also, this can come and drive up to you, right? That's the other thing. It can leave the space and come to you. That's some Batmobile stuff. That's pretty cool. To which you would say, just learn to walk. Also, get a pair of shoes. Look, if, you know, we'd still be in the caves, Chris. I feel like we talked about this last night. But, anyhow, we have you here because we want to talk about valve. Before we talk about valve, do you want to talk about Oculus at all? We've been talking about all of them. Yeah, we can talk about Oculus. And last night. Maybe you didn't see it last night or hear about it. I tweeted about it. We had a magical experience here. We had a chance to play with the Oculus Rift, which is a virtual reality headset that was a Kickstarter project, which is now, there it is right there. As soon as you say that, it's like, don't go. No, really. Yeah. We've been talking about it. It was like nonstop, 24 hours straight now because we actually got to try this in the trailer. And it is an incredible, totally futuristic, cutting edge, breathtaking, exhilarating experience. And Chris and I both had our first eyes on, if you will, with the Oculus Rift. Really? Yeah. And it was crazy. I mean, what's your take on it? I think it was, I think it was the promise of virtual reality that we've heard for a long time. It was the first time I've had a 3D gaming experience that I thought was worth anything. Yeah. Like a 3D TV with gaming, I don't care. It doesn't do anything. It really, the first thing, and I think they did the same thing for both of us. They tell you when you first put it on, they tell you to look, to turn around all the way around. You can turn your head all the way as far as it can go. And it just feels like you're looking behind you. You know? And, oh, here it is. Here's some, here's some footage from it. This is the top shelf. On the, on the, I mean, nothing can do it justice. I mean, you can't, but look at, but look at when you see the motion of the, of the game here, look at how much more real that looks than what you normally experience in a game, the way you're moving around. Because when you move around with the controller, you're very metered in the control. When this thing is on your head, you can, it actually looks more like a handheld camera. It was the craziest thing. The way the footage is moving. When we had it on, they kept asking us to roll our heads, you know, like this. Yeah. Because it, it rolls. You can like, it's not a camera angle you're used to seeing in games where you sort of have a horizon. Right. I mean, you can, you know, it's, you start to do things like peek around corners. They had, they did this thing where they had, there was some sparks flying off of them. They showed the sparks. It actually was even more interesting. This just sounds like the hippiest thing. I was like, I just watched a fan for like a minute. It was just like, the fact that you can look up at anything. What I thought was interesting was not just the sparks falling down, you know, as you're up underneath it, but there was this little area, this little vent area next to it that you could kind of look into. And it just felt like I'm looking into something in reality. And yeah, it's a really, really incredible product. They're starting to sell, they're selling dev kits for it, which include the goggles for 300 bucks. Right. I don't think they have a price yet. No, I think, I don't know. I don't know the price, but I think it's going to be affordable. It's amazing. I mean, I think there's some, there's been some chatter. I'm not sure. And it's amazing. Like what we saw was like very low resolution, but it's still incredibly immersive because it's super responsive. Like it's complete depth of field. You can't see like the black bars that take you out of the experience. It's really something. And I think that when you think about gaming and we're talking a lot here about gaming, which is, you know, this valve stuff is why you're sitting here. You know, this is another piece of that puzzle that when you start to think about all these pieces we're putting together, you know, technology in general looks exciting, but gaming especially is getting really weird and cool and interesting. It is. So let's talk about valve. It is an interesting story here because there's no public presence. But I think it's actually one of the most interesting stories of CES. And they were at CES last year as well. Right. And in fact, when we talked about the Steam Box, the rumor of the Steam Box, what we heard was at the CES, at the last CES, they were showing this kind of reference hardware to people and saying, this is what we want to build. Yeah, to partners and manufacturers. Exactly. Right. And now we like, now they're being way more open about like they're meeting with hardware partners. They're setting the outlines. Gabe Newell, Valve CEO, and basically just the forward presence of the company, sat down with us for about 45 minutes and just kind of outlined everything they're doing. What is the Steam Box? What are they being very controlling of? What do they want partners to do? Yeah. And it's, it's broad, it's far reaching. The general gist, like the poetic version of this is good, better, best. Yeah. Good is a $99 console. It does local streaming, you know. Better is this tightly controlled. This is the specs we want. It's a $300 box. If you want to do it with us, we kind of tell you what it is. Yeah. And best is anything you want. Like is- Right. You want to build, you want to build your own mega system and turn it into a Steam Box. No problem. Exactly. There'll be like disk drives. They said, you know, manufacturers want to put disk drives in, but they're allowed. They're expensive. They increase the size of the box. So it's like, that's kind of on the high end. Right. Right. Right. I mean, I think it's, I think it's brilliant. I mean, what, what, you know, my question is, does this have, can this have an impact on, on the, on the community, on the gaming community as it is now on the industry? I mean, we've got some pretty entrenched players, right? Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft. They're obviously not going anywhere anytime soon. So how does the Steam Box matter? Can it matter on a grand scale or is this much more of a niche product? I think it's going to be, it'll be interesting. You see PC gaming kind of growing in popularity right now for a couple reasons. One, we're at the end of a console life cycle. A lot of people are looking for something new and exciting and more powerful and you're seeing it on PCs. If you compare Far Cry 3 on a PC to Far Cry 3 on your Xbox, it's kind of night and day. It looks incredible on a computer. Indie games. There's all these indie games coming out that are overwhelmingly on PC if they're not on your phone. And a lot of those games don't come to your console. So if you have a box or device that makes it easier to play that stuff, you can play it on your television in your living room. Valve told me yesterday that it was their customers that told them they wanted the Steam Box, that they wanted to play their games in their living room. They're doing it. They already have an Xbox. So Valve is in a lot of ways reacting to what their customers already do. They already play games in their living room. So the question is how do you make the PC experience work in the living room? And that's what they're trying to do. I mean, to me, and I'm obviously not the core audience of a specialist, but I really love the idea of, look, I don't want a game on a desktop. I want to sit down with my big TV, with the great sound in my living room, and play games. But if I had the opportunity to play better looking games, more immersive games, games that are bigger because there's no limitation on what you can do or how big it can be. Games that are cheaper, right? And cheaper and of a wider variety in the sense that there's no barrier. It's a real barrier to entry for developers. To me, that sounds like a dream come true. I mean, I would love to stick that under my TV and use it. I feel like there's got to be a market for that. I think that it's going to be about, some of this is going to be about the games. They need to deliver something. This is your pitch for Valve to do another Half-Life. They need to do Half-Life. They need to do the third Half-Life. And that doesn't sound right. And make it exclusive to this thing. Or just do a bigger game than anybody's done before. A better game. Do you think the Steam Box is going to live outside of Steam or just be another extension of the platform? I don't imagine them fragmenting in any way. I think it's like... No, I mean, they'll have to. They're not going to not make it available to all of the users, obviously. I just think that there needs to be some incentive for me to go, all right. For me, there is incentive. But for the broader audience, I think you need to say, how can you do it? I'm just really excited that there is the opportunity for this innovation. I think we were talking about what led to the... Before the show started, we were talking about what led to the Oculus Rift. And about this global situation with cheaper parts, better parts, open source really taking over, really becoming mainstream in many ways with Android. And I think this is a product of that in many ways. Not of Android, but of just this feeling that this stuff is cheap enough, it's easy enough. There's an audience there that really cares about it because the technology or the gaming audience has grown so big and so mainstream. I think it's really exciting time for this stuff. Exactly. Here's something else that was interesting about what he got into with that. Not so much just that we're going to go on the big screen, but this is our chance to say, we're not necessarily happy with the keyboard and mouse. We're not necessarily happy with the gamepad. We want to find a new way of really interfacing with these games. Really thinking long and hard. It's definitely not motion. He's not a huge fan of Kinect, but there was a long talk about biometrics. The idea that your wrist kind of tells what you're about to do. It actually makes it faster. They've been... I mean, this is true, Chris. Valve has been working on... They've been experimenting a lot from what we understand. Valve is a company that likes to experiment. They're a private company. They've got basically one owner. They are really rich. I think it's the highest grossing company per employee in the country. Really? In the world, yeah. That's crazy. That's crazy. They have the luxury of taking all the time in the world on the Steam box where it's rumored for a year and they're like, we're not in a rush. They have a whole team that's doing R&D on things like biometrics. They have a whole team that's doing work on... Is this actually going right past me? Guys, I got to go. Sorry. I got to just jump out. They have a whole team that's doing work on education in gaming and figuring out how we can use games to work in education. Why? Because they're interested in it. I think they said one person basically could ship a product at Valve. Normally it's as little as three. You could shoot some buy-ins. There's almost no bureaucracy. There's almost no organizational structure. If you're a person at Valve, Greg Coomer who started Big Picture which became Steam Box... You guys have a piece of him that went up this morning. You should check it out. Coomer... Sorry. So Greg Coomer... I'm so choked up about this piece you ran. It was amazing. So he started... It was basically his idea. He was one of the first champions and he just had to convince a couple other people at Valve that this was a good enough idea. As soon as you have some buy-in from a couple people, now you've got a project that the company can officially sanction. So Big Picture started about two years ago and has grown into this effort, the Steam Box effort. The most interesting thing is that the Steam Box effort isn't just this idea of partnering with outside hardware manufacturers and trying to get... Almost outsource the work and convince the Alienwares of the world or the Xi3s of the world to create a Steam Box for you. But Valve itself wants to make one. I think Gabe was pretty specific when he said, we're going to make one. We're going to ship it. It's going to have Linux on it. If you want to put Windows on it, you can. And that's kind of a crazy idea, right? Yeah. Valve's not a hardware company. Yeah. It's a really exciting development, I think. And I'm just glad that they're now talking about it. Because I think there are all these rumors. We talked about it. You guys have talked about it a ton. And it's like, just say if you're doing something or not. Give us some sense of what's happening. That gets down to the idea that Valve as a private company doesn't need to market it. They don't have the same effort where it's like, okay, now we're going to tease it. We're going to announce it. We're going to have a big event. They're just kind of like... Right. Maybe we would not even be having this conversation had we not harassed Gabe into giving us this interview, essentially. Yeah. It's luck of the draw. Anyhow, I think we need to move on. We do need to move on. Unfortunately, I would like... I mean, Chris was actually on the Vergecast last night, and I thought it was brilliant, brilliant performance on the Vergecast. And I would like you to spend the rest of the day talking to you. So when we're done here... Cancel my voice. Please do. But thanks for coming on. And you're here for the rest of the show, right? I think so. Just hanging out. You're going to see more of Chris Grant. And the Vergecast is awesome. You can catch it on the Video Hero. It's still there. Vergecast will come back tonight, tomorrow night, every single night until we get back. Vergecast is like a vampire that you can't even stake it in the heart. It doesn't have a heart. And this would be vampire... Because its heart was broken. And this is vampire weekday, of course. By its vampire girlfriend. Right. We also have Top Shelf in the afternoon, 90 and 95 times a day. First. Tomorrow is our last first? Tomorrow is our last first. Is that right? Oh, man. Well, last first of CES. Last first of CES. But how are we going to celebrate? We need to really think hard. By the way, we'll take suggestions... Yes....on ways to celebrate our final first of CES. First last. First last. Last first. Last first. First last. Last first. First last, first last. If you have any ideas on how to actually even say that, it would be great. Yeah, that would be really terrific. Anyway, those are shows. We have day two of the show floor. We're going to really look at the weird... Yeah, there's going to be more news today. We're out on the show floor. This is the day where we really start to find the stuff that you haven't heard about yet that maybe you didn't see a press conference on or that you know... And here's one if you don't watch CES stuff in the years past. You might have seen it. But we got Dante Dorazio, one of our star reporters in New York. This is our weird thing. This is our very weird... Well, just check it out. Yeah, a face cake. It's called face cake. Face cake. I've just stepped into a dress here at CES 2013. This is our virtual signage prototype that they have here from face cake. It's called the face cake swivel. We saw this last year, but what this is using is a connect, and they've designed this to... They've scanned these clothes, and the idea is that when you're walking down the street, you might see this signage, and you'll decide that you'd like to step into it and see what it's like. So if I step in, I could check out this purse, and I could add a necklace, and I could even switch hands. Face cake is hoping that retailers and other advertisers will be using these signs in malls and even in their front windows to get people not only to view a photograph of their clothing or the accessories, but they'll be able to actually try it on. And it's not in any stores yet at the moment, but they plan on improving it, and I'm sure they're shopping it around. The sign's based on the same technology that we saw last year from face cake, which is the face cake swivel, a virtual dressing room that lets you choose dresses and suits and ties that you'd like to try on. We've also announced here at CES a face cake swivel up close, which is designed for you to try on makeup in a very similar fashion. This technology itself is based off of a Kinect sensor. They are reading body size, and they've already created models in-house. They've created models of clothing and accessories, and they're mapping it onto your body. The sign itself is designed for retailers or advertisers that would like to not only show static imagery on digital signs, but they'd like to try to get people to actually try on these clothes without even stepping into the store. Of course, we haven't seen this yet in action, like in reality, but the face cake says that they'll keep on working on it, and they'll keep on improving it, of course. Swivel ran a trial of the technology this past fall at 20 Bloomingdales, and if you'd like to try it out yourself, we're told that they're going to start running it later this year. And on that note, you've officially been firsted. We'll see you tomorrow.
 Vals Gabe Newell wants to sense your body and he's making a steam box. This is First.
 I'm Josh Tupolsky. I'm Ross Miller and this is day two of the show floor. Day three of
 CES. Of First. No. Day two of CES. Yes. Day three of First. Day six or seven of us. I've
 lost count of how long I've been in Las Vegas, but what I do know is I'm now an escort. So,
 you know, it's all really working out pretty well. You must have had a late night then.
 I had a number of late nights due to my new job as a female escort. Did I mention it was
 also a female escort? I mean, female. You know, let's not get bogged down in the details.
 So basically you're a female pretending to be a male pretending to be a female escort.
 Something like that. I mean, I don't know. I think it's in the movie. Everybody seems
 to enjoy it. That's the important thing. Everybody's happy to get to work. Point is we're exhausted.
 Everybody's having a good time. We're very tired. This is day two of the show floor being
 open. We have been here for quite a while covering the show. Yesterday was a massive
 day for us. Our biggest day I think yet with a ton of stuff, funny stuff, weird stuff.
 It's been very surprising how much fun I've been having in CES. I have to say, I mean,
 you know, I am not, I really, I try not to sound like I'm cheerleading CES because I
 think normally we come here and we're, you know, we see this as a mission we've got to
 get through. We have a really good time with our team. This year everybody was saying,
 oh, it's going to be a bad show and things are going to be terrible and it's, you know,
 hardware is dead. And I actually think it's been a really fun, amazing year so far. I
 think we've been looking at this show different than from years past. It's just we're looking
 for the weird more than we are. Like, we're not looking at Browder's anymore. We're years
 past that. Yeah, I just think that, I think you get that, you know, I think just in general
 the public gets Sony's going to talk about 4K TV or whatever and there's going to be,
 you're going to get the press stuff, the regular press stuff and then you've got to find the
 other stories that are interesting here. And I think, I think we've been doing that and
 that's really interesting to me. But, and we'll get to that and we'll get to Valve.
 And we will, sorry, yeah, we're going to talk about Valve in just a little bit, but we've
 got some headlines. We've got headlines. The first thing, yesterday T-Mobile made a huge
 push for its carriers. Really wanted to get past number four. It made a, a bunch of big
 announcements. First and foremost, LT. It'll be its first market is here next week. Yeah.
 A hundred million people by middle of this year. Yeah. Is that, is that, that, that,
 that LT is going to be interoperable with AT&T? I don't think so. What's, do we know?
 I don't think we know, but I think. Why are they doing this? They're just making a new
 version. Wait, wait, wait, why are they doing this? I mean, you know, it's just, I know
 why they're doing it. I just think it's the worst. Like, can we intervene here? It's all
 the same LTE. Can we make the right, can we correct our mistakes? It's all the same LTE
 like it's all the same 4G. Well, no, but you know, Verizon had either CDMA and there's
 GSM, right? Right. But now we don't have that problem. The LTE is like different bands,
 different spectrums. It's, it's all over the place. Okay, fine. Point is, no, you can't
 have this beautiful hippie dream world of yours. HD voice. HD voice is now HD voice
 compatible if you have a Galaxy S3 or the One S, you can start using it. Yeah. I still
 have never used HD voice. Chris, Chris Ziegler says that it is an incredible innovation that
 we just can't appreciate yet. How often do you, I just don't make phone calls anymore.
 I do everything I can to avoid phone calls. I don't like talking to people. If there's
 any way I can get out of talking on the phone, I will use that technique. Faking my own death,
 holding someone hostage saying, you know, I can't come to the phone because I'm in a
 hostage situation. I don't even know. I don't know what that would be. Why would you take,
 why would you hold somebody hostage if you just wanted to avoid a phone call? I mean,
 it seems like there are easier ways to get out of it. It's like, look, I want to, I want
 to talk to you about your, your hostage situation, but you need to join this group. That's right.
 And the last thing I did was unlimited data, completely unlimited data without contracts,
 starting at $70 a month. Yeah. The big thing of course is you don't get a subsidized phone,
 but T-Mobile has been doing a great job, not doing like half the new customers were contract
 free from the, some of the newer plans they've been doing. I mean, T-Mobile is really pushing
 them. It's like, we're the new unique carrier. You don't want a contract. You want unlimited
 data. These are the buzzwords we always talk about wanting. I actually find these announcements
 relatively boring. Can I be honest? Based on what we've been seeing here, this to me
 is one of the least interesting things. I mean, this, it just does not, it just kind
 of does nothing for me. Okay. It's the, in fact, I feel dead. That was, that, that news
 didn't want to go away. Boomerang. Either you're bad at throwing those or you really
 got to chuck them towards the camera. I think it's a little bit of both. No. All right.
 This is going to bore you just as much. We're going to get through it. It's the Wall Street
 Journal Digitimes and Bloomberg trifecta of rumors, cheap iPhone. Okay. So here's what
 I think is interesting. Okay. First off, they say they could be a cheaper iPhone with a
 polycarbonate body. It might be, you know, some new material that's easier to produce,
 cheaper and easier to produce. They'll call it something new, but it's, they'll call it
 something new, but it'll essentially be an iPhone 4S. Oh, polycarbonate. Yeah. They'll
 call it, you know, Apple, Apple carbonate. I, I, I carbonate. Yeah. But, so what I think
 is interesting about this is that historically for us, Apple has disrupted CES with, with
 news and, and no, you know, and this is, they do this, they love to do this. They, they
 have, there's something that happens somehow, you know, this, somehow this got leaked to
 the Wall Street Journal. You know, we don't know how they have very reliable sources.
 They've all, they're pretty much, they don't publish an Apple rumor unless it turns in.
 It turns out to be true. But you know, they always disrupt the show with news. What I
 thought was interesting is that yesterday on our site, this news hit and I looked at
 our traffic and it was the seventh most traffic post at prime time during the news, which
 I think is kind of incredible when you think about Apple's presence in the industry and
 that everybody said this show was going to be dead. And when I looked at our front page,
 what was trending was actual news from, from the show. I agree, but let me play a little
 bit devil's advocate. Please don't. Had, too bad. Had Apple done a special event announcement
 like they do every year in scripts. Totally different. That would have changed everything.
 Totally different. I mean, had they said we're doing, we're holding an event, please join
 us, tune in. If it had been like tune in, this show would have been over in one second
 because everybody would have started working on their editorials about Apple's TV initiative.
 What I also thought was interesting is that the phone itself is whatever. Apple's going
 to make a cheaper iPhone. I think that's great. I think the more, the more, the more we can
 get great smartphones in the hands of the people, the better off we'll all be. But what
 I thought was really interesting was this rumor happened and then 15 minutes later,
 Facebook issued an invite to an event. Right. And I have, I strongly feel that they must
 have been waiting to see if Apple was going to do an event and they were like, well, they're
 not doing it. Let's, let's do it. It's a CS tradition that Apple will screw it up somehow
 with an announcement. This time they did not. This was a, this was a spike. Right. A little
 disrupt, disrupt, disruptive spike, but it wasn't a, it didn't obliterate the show. Right.
 But Facebook is building something new. Facebook obliterated the show. We'll find that later.
 They managed to like everything. I don't know what that means. That's not even funny. Let's
 move on. All right. Let's pretend that never happened. The last, last story before we kind
 of get to the bigger things. This is actually, I think this kind of fell under the radar.
 Huawei is, I can't believe we're talking about Huawei. We are talking about Huawei because
 the one, didn't we talk about Huawei yesterday? We talked about the device. We have a, we
 actually have Sam Baffert out here. He spoke with the head of consumer electronics, Richard
 Yu, who had quite a few interesting things to say. Yeah. Let's, let's talk to Sam. Sam,
 are you with us? Hey, yeah, I'm here. Hey Sam. Hey Sam. Sam, you, you met with the,
 he's the CEO of Huawei. He is the head of consumer electronics. Head of consumer electronics
 at Huawei because they also do a heavy industry, I would assume. Yes. They're a Chinese company.
 Can you tell me a little bit about, about what you guys talked about? Yes. When you
 were chatting? So, I mean, the news here is. You might want to hold that mic a little bit
 closer to your mouth. Sure. How's this? Much better. It's a lot better. So the thing here
 is he, he was very bullish and confident. He was trying to convince me that Huawei makes
 the best phones in the world. He called out Samsung, he called out Apple and he was telling
 me that basically the new phones that they announced yesterday, the Ascend Mate and the
 D2, they are the best phones in the world. And what's interesting there is that until
 now the company has been very much, it sells a lot of phones, but not in the high end at
 all. I mean, I don't know about you guys. The only guy I know with a Huawei phone is
 Paul Miller and that's because he doesn't use the internet. So. Yeah. I mean, that's,
 that, that what you just said is 100% accurate. Right. Medically accurate. But I, I'm just
 wondering what do you get? I mean, you use the phones, right? You saw them. Do you feel
 that he has the stuff to back up his, his talk? Does he, do they make the best phones?
 Are they better than Samsung phones? I mean, so the Ascend Mate has a 6.1 inch screen,
 right? It's not going to be the, it's certainly not going to be the best phone for everyone
 in the world. Anyone with pockets, for example. But I mean, it's the quality I would say is
 from what I, from what I used, it seems like comparable to a Samsung phone or something.
 It's they're plastic-y. They're not, they're not like super, super high end, but they feel
 pretty good. They don't flex or anything. And I mean, the real issue is they're not
 going to be sold in the US. And. That's because the US perceives Huawei as a potential spy
 threat. Well, this is the thing. He says that. I'm not making that up. I'm not just being
 racist or something. That's, that's the, the, there's some concern that they are going to
 infiltrate the United States. No, and he, there's been potential investigation. He absolutely
 said that. And he said, he said that US carriers, he'd spoken with them. They're trying to build
 a relationship and carriers actually like Huawei's products, but he says that there
 is influence from the US government and that there are trust issues and they need to work.
 They really need to sort of work hard to get Huawei as an accepted brand, as a trusted
 company in the US. Do you, what do you make of his Steve Jobs comment? I mean, the Steve
 Jobs comment, he, so the actual comment, he said, Steve Jobs is gone. Now there is a lack
 of innovation. And I mean, basically he's trying to put the phones in the same conversation
 as Apple. I mean, right. I mean, is he trying to draw, he's saying, and thank God we're,
 Huawei is here to deliver the kind of innovation that Steve Jobs would have delivered. Well,
 like a 6.1 inch phone. Exactly. I mean, Tim Cook is clearly incapable of delivering a
 6.1 inch phone. What is their skin called? What is the name of their skin? Emotion UI.
 Emotion UI. Did you feel moved by it? I was not moved. I will say one, one thing that
 I thought was a great idea. You have this 6.1 inch phone, but there's like a one handed
 mode. So they, they shrink the keyboard down and they shrink the keypad down to sort of
 go into the bottom left or the bottom right corner. So you can actually use this gigantic
 phone in one hand fairly comfortably. I mean, it's still, you certainly can't cover the
 whole screen with your thumb like you can with an iPhone, for example. But it's a pretty
 thoughtful innovation. They've clearly thought, it's not like Samsung, for example, who just,
 like they release the Galaxy Note, they blow up the Android UI to a huge screen. Huawei
 has actually thought about how people might use this device and I was quite impressed
 with that. So it sounds like we've got at least one new Huawei fan in the world, Sam.
 Yes, well, I'm a con-vet. What can I say? Yeah. All right, well, we've got to move on,
 but Sam, thanks for joining us. Did you, was there anything that you had there? No, that's
 about it. Sam, thanks for joining us and we'll see you later in the trailer for cocktails.
 Thanks a lot. What I find interesting, this is, well, the historical thing. I feel like
 Huawei could be at the point where HTC was years and years ago. No, absolutely. They're
 just about to push it. No, I agree with you 100%. I just think that what I've seen of
 their products, there's nothing notable about their products. They feel completely anonymous.
 HTC actually had started pushing a really interesting and aggressive and different industrial
 design. They started doing something that made you go, wait a second, whoa, these guys
 are making really nice phones. They started doing Sense when, before there was really
 an idea of, I mean, they'd been doing Sense, it was originally called, what was it called?
 I don't remember. It had a different name. Anyhow, the point is maybe it was just called
 Sense. They were doing Skinning on Windows Mobile and they brought that to Android. That
 was really the start of this whole Skinning fad, Skinning trend. I think they had some
 real stuff to bring to the table. Huawei is just a me too. They're like, oh, you did a
 big phone? We did a big phone. You guys have a, it's got pen input? We have a pen input.
 You're going to do Windows phone? We've got a Windows phone.
 It's just so interesting when these companies, they're big companies and make a lot of money.
 HTC was one of those, they were doing phones for other people, really kind of cow-town
 where their carriers wanted and get the branding. But now Huawei wants to be its own company,
 wants to have its brand in front. No matter how big they are, that's a huge struggle.
 It's funny, they can't do it. I got to tell you, Huawei's got an uphill battle with that
 name in America. If we still are unsure, if we still are messing it up, average Americans
 are not going to, that's just a nightmare. They just need to change the name to a W or
 something. All right, well, we should move on. I'm going to try this card one more time.
 There we go. That was not bad. That was a straight shot. Straight toward Michael Shane's
 head. It almost took off Michael's face, almost took off his eyes. Hey, buddy, I've got plenty
 more of these. Just watch it. What else? Anyway, we're going to get that. This is a cool report
 from yesterday. Chris Ziegler risked life and limb to let a car park itself while he
 sat in the passenger seat crying. This is awesome. This to me is really futuristic.
 So much the future. Yeah, check out this video, Chris Ziegler and Audi. When we come back,
 Chris Grant. Nice. Yes. This is Chris Ziegler with The Verge, and I am in the passenger
 seat of this car. I'm not driving. Why not? Because it's Audi's self-driving car. You'll
 notice that there's nobody in the driver's seat. We're about to go on a wild ride through
 the parking garage of the Mandarin Oriental. Got some sensors set up around here. These
 are laser scanners that help the car figure out where to go, and then it goes on a short
 path, maybe a hundred, 150 feet out to the front. We get out, then the car turns around.
 That part has to be done by hand with a real driver. And then we drive back in and the
 car backs into the spot. It's a little scary. This is our robot overlord future in action.
 It's happening right here in Las Vegas. I'm a little terrified. Let's see how this goes.
 So, it's slow. This is not like a Google car. This is not like the car that Lexus introduced
 yesterday. This is going five miles an hour through a preset course. Audi plans on getting
 there. They want to get to a full, like, highway experience. In fact, they're only the second
 automaker to have permission in the state of Nevada to drive on highways with self-driving
 cars. But this is not that. This is just to help you park the car without having to be
 in it. Imagine you're at a mall, you're at some sort of shopping center, pull out your
 smartphone, hit a button, the car comes and picks you up. That's what this is. So, it's
 pretty awesome. I'm not going to lie. For the time being, I'm okay driving the car myself.
 Parking really isn't that big of a deal. But, you know, if I have to pay another 100, 200
 bucks to get this feature on my next car, I might do it. Audi's thinking 10 years out
 for this. So, we'll see how that goes. All right, Audi. Let's go back to the convention
 center. And we're back with Chris Grant, editor-in-chief of Polygon.com and world-renowned hip-hop
 dancer. Look it up. That's crazy. Before we get into talking about valve and theme and
 steam and valve, can they come up with some other less mechanical? It's fine. It's their
 thing. What were you just saying about the auto parking? The auto auto parking. All this
 effort, you see a lot of times these cars that can auto park or parallel park. It's
 like just learn to parallel park. This car can also, this can come and drive up to you,
 right? That's the other thing. It can leave the space and come to you. That's some Batmobile
 stuff. That's pretty cool. To which you would say, just learn to walk. Also, get a pair
 of shoes. Look, if, you know, we'd still be in the caves, Chris. I feel like we talked
 about this last night. But, anyhow, we have you here because we want to talk about valve.
 Before we talk about valve, do you want to talk about Oculus at all? We've been talking
 about all of them. Yeah, we can talk about Oculus. And last night. Maybe you didn't see
 it last night or hear about it. I tweeted about it. We had a magical experience here.
 We had a chance to play with the Oculus Rift, which is a virtual reality headset that was
 a Kickstarter project, which is now, there it is right there. As soon as you say that,
 it's like, don't go. No, really. Yeah. We've been talking about it. It was like nonstop,
 24 hours straight now because we actually got to try this in the trailer. And it is
 an incredible, totally futuristic, cutting edge, breathtaking, exhilarating experience.
 And Chris and I both had our first eyes on, if you will, with the Oculus Rift. Really?
 Yeah. And it was crazy. I mean, what's your take on it? I think it was, I think it was
 the promise of virtual reality that we've heard for a long time. It was the first time
 I've had a 3D gaming experience that I thought was worth anything. Yeah. Like a 3D TV with
 gaming, I don't care. It doesn't do anything. It really, the first thing, and I think they
 did the same thing for both of us. They tell you when you first put it on, they tell you
 to look, to turn around all the way around. You can turn your head all the way as far
 as it can go. And it just feels like you're looking behind you. You know? And, oh, here
 it is. Here's some, here's some footage from it. This is the top shelf. On the, on the,
 I mean, nothing can do it justice. I mean, you can't, but look at, but look at when you
 see the motion of the, of the game here, look at how much more real that looks than what
 you normally experience in a game, the way you're moving around. Because when you move
 around with the controller, you're very metered in the control. When this thing is on your
 head, you can, it actually looks more like a handheld camera. It was the craziest thing.
 The way the footage is moving. When we had it on, they kept asking us to roll our heads,
 you know, like this. Yeah. Because it, it rolls. You can like, it's not a camera angle
 you're used to seeing in games where you sort of have a horizon. Right. I mean, you can,
 you know, it's, you start to do things like peek around corners. They had, they did this
 thing where they had, there was some sparks flying off of them. They showed the sparks.
 It actually was even more interesting. This just sounds like the hippiest thing. I was
 like, I just watched a fan for like a minute. It was just like, the fact that you can look
 up at anything. What I thought was interesting was not just the sparks falling down, you
 know, as you're up underneath it, but there was this little area, this little vent area
 next to it that you could kind of look into. And it just felt like I'm looking into something
 in reality. And yeah, it's a really, really incredible product. They're starting to sell,
 they're selling dev kits for it, which include the goggles for 300 bucks. Right. I don't
 think they have a price yet. No, I think, I don't know. I don't know the price, but
 I think it's going to be affordable. It's amazing. I mean, I think there's some, there's
 been some chatter. I'm not sure. And it's amazing. Like what we saw was like very low
 resolution, but it's still incredibly immersive because it's super responsive. Like it's complete
 depth of field. You can't see like the black bars that take you out of the experience.
 It's really something. And I think that when you think about gaming and we're talking a
 lot here about gaming, which is, you know, this valve stuff is why you're sitting here.
 You know, this is another piece of that puzzle that when you start to think about all these
 pieces we're putting together, you know, technology in general looks exciting, but gaming especially
 is getting really weird and cool and interesting. It is. So let's talk about valve. It is an
 interesting story here because there's no public presence. But I think it's actually
 one of the most interesting stories of CES. And they were at CES last year as well. Right.
 And in fact, when we talked about the Steam Box, the rumor of the Steam Box, what we heard
 was at the CES, at the last CES, they were showing this kind of reference hardware to
 people and saying, this is what we want to build. Yeah, to partners and manufacturers.
 Exactly. Right. And now we like, now they're being way more open about like they're meeting
 with hardware partners. They're setting the outlines. Gabe Newell, Valve CEO, and basically
 just the forward presence of the company, sat down with us for about 45 minutes and
 just kind of outlined everything they're doing. What is the Steam Box? What are they being
 very controlling of? What do they want partners to do? Yeah. And it's, it's broad, it's far
 reaching. The general gist, like the poetic version of this is good, better, best. Yeah.
 Good is a $99 console. It does local streaming, you know. Better is this tightly controlled.
 This is the specs we want. It's a $300 box. If you want to do it with us, we kind of tell
 you what it is. Yeah. And best is anything you want. Like is- Right. You want to build,
 you want to build your own mega system and turn it into a Steam Box. No problem. Exactly.
 There'll be like disk drives. They said, you know, manufacturers want to put disk drives
 in, but they're allowed. They're expensive. They increase the size of the box. So it's
 like, that's kind of on the high end. Right. Right. Right. I mean, I think it's, I think
 it's brilliant. I mean, what, what, you know, my question is, does this have, can this have
 an impact on, on the, on the community, on the gaming community as it is now on the industry?
 I mean, we've got some pretty entrenched players, right? Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft. They're
 obviously not going anywhere anytime soon. So how does the Steam Box matter? Can it matter
 on a grand scale or is this much more of a niche product? I think it's going to be, it'll
 be interesting. You see PC gaming kind of growing in popularity right now for a couple
 reasons. One, we're at the end of a console life cycle. A lot of people are looking for
 something new and exciting and more powerful and you're seeing it on PCs. If you compare
 Far Cry 3 on a PC to Far Cry 3 on your Xbox, it's kind of night and day. It looks incredible
 on a computer. Indie games. There's all these indie games coming out that are overwhelmingly
 on PC if they're not on your phone. And a lot of those games don't come to your console.
 So if you have a box or device that makes it easier to play that stuff, you can play
 it on your television in your living room. Valve told me yesterday that it was their
 customers that told them they wanted the Steam Box, that they wanted to play their games
 in their living room. They're doing it. They already have an Xbox. So Valve is in a lot
 of ways reacting to what their customers already do. They already play games in their living
 room. So the question is how do you make the PC experience work in the living room? And
 that's what they're trying to do. I mean, to me, and I'm obviously not the core audience
 of a specialist, but I really love the idea of, look, I don't want a game on a desktop.
 I want to sit down with my big TV, with the great sound in my living room, and play games.
 But if I had the opportunity to play better looking games, more immersive games, games
 that are bigger because there's no limitation on what you can do or how big it can be.
 Games that are cheaper, right?
 And cheaper and of a wider variety in the sense that there's no barrier. It's a real
 barrier to entry for developers. To me, that sounds like a dream come true. I mean, I would
 love to stick that under my TV and use it. I feel like there's got to be a market for
 that. I think that it's going to be about, some of this is going to be about the games.
 They need to deliver something.
 This is your pitch for Valve to do another Half-Life.
 They need to do Half-Life. They need to do the third Half-Life. And that doesn't sound
 right. And make it exclusive to this thing. Or just do a bigger game than anybody's done
 before. A better game.
 Do you think the Steam Box is going to live outside of Steam or just be another extension
 of the platform? I don't imagine them fragmenting in any way. I think it's like...
 No, I mean, they'll have to. They're not going to not make it available to all of the users,
 obviously. I just think that there needs to be some incentive for me to go, all right.
 For me, there is incentive. But for the broader audience, I think you need to say, how can
 you do it? I'm just really excited that there is the opportunity for this innovation. I
 think we were talking about what led to the... Before the show started, we were talking
 about what led to the Oculus Rift. And about this global situation with cheaper parts,
 better parts, open source really taking over, really becoming mainstream in many ways with
 Android. And I think this is a product of that in many ways. Not of Android, but of
 just this feeling that this stuff is cheap enough, it's easy enough. There's an audience
 there that really cares about it because the technology or the gaming audience has grown
 so big and so mainstream. I think it's really exciting time for this stuff.
 Exactly. Here's something else that was interesting about what he got into with that. Not so much
 just that we're going to go on the big screen, but this is our chance to say, we're not necessarily
 happy with the keyboard and mouse. We're not necessarily happy with the gamepad. We want
 to find a new way of really interfacing with these games. Really thinking long and hard.
 It's definitely not motion. He's not a huge fan of Kinect, but there was a long talk about
 biometrics. The idea that your wrist kind of tells what you're about to do. It actually
 makes it faster.
 They've been... I mean, this is true, Chris. Valve has been working on... They've been
 experimenting a lot from what we understand.
 Valve is a company that likes to experiment. They're a private company. They've got basically
 one owner. They are really rich. I think it's the highest grossing company per employee
 in the country.
 Really?
 In the world, yeah.
 That's crazy.
 That's crazy.
 They have the luxury of taking all the time in the world on the Steam box where it's rumored
 for a year and they're like, we're not in a rush. They have a whole team that's doing
 R&D on things like biometrics. They have a whole team that's doing work on...
 Is this actually going right past me?
 Guys, I got to go. Sorry. I got to just jump out. They have a whole team that's doing work
 on education in gaming and figuring out how we can use games to work in education. Why?
 Because they're interested in it. I think they said one person basically could ship
 a product at Valve. Normally it's as little as three. You could shoot some buy-ins. There's
 almost no bureaucracy. There's almost no organizational structure. If you're a person at Valve, Greg
 Coomer who started Big Picture which became Steam Box...
 You guys have a piece of him that went up this morning. You should check it out.
 Coomer...
 Sorry.
 So Greg Coomer...
 I'm so choked up about this piece you ran. It was amazing.
 So he started... It was basically his idea. He was one of the first champions and he just
 had to convince a couple other people at Valve that this was a good enough idea. As soon
 as you have some buy-in from a couple people, now you've got a project that the company
 can officially sanction. So Big Picture started about two years ago and has grown into this
 effort, the Steam Box effort. The most interesting thing is that the Steam Box effort isn't just
 this idea of partnering with outside hardware manufacturers and trying to get... Almost outsource
 the work and convince the Alienwares of the world or the Xi3s of the world to create a
 Steam Box for you. But Valve itself wants to make one. I think Gabe was pretty specific
 when he said, we're going to make one. We're going to ship it. It's going to have Linux
 on it. If you want to put Windows on it, you can. And that's kind of a crazy idea, right?
 Yeah.
 Valve's not a hardware company.
 Yeah. It's a really exciting development, I think. And I'm just glad that they're now
 talking about it. Because I think there are all these rumors. We talked about it. You
 guys have talked about it a ton. And it's like, just say if you're doing something or
 not. Give us some sense of what's happening.
 That gets down to the idea that Valve as a private company doesn't need to market it.
 They don't have the same effort where it's like, okay, now we're going to tease it. We're
 going to announce it. We're going to have a big event. They're just kind of like...
 Right. Maybe we would not even be having this conversation had we not harassed Gabe into
 giving us this interview, essentially.
 Yeah. It's luck of the draw.
 Anyhow, I think we need to move on.
 We do need to move on.
 Unfortunately, I would like... I mean, Chris was actually on the Vergecast last night,
 and I thought it was brilliant, brilliant performance on the Vergecast. And I would
 like you to spend the rest of the day talking to you.
 So when we're done here...
 Cancel my voice.
 Please do. But thanks for coming on. And you're here for the rest of the show, right?
 I think so. Just hanging out.
 You're going to see more of Chris Grant.
 And the Vergecast is awesome. You can catch it on the Video Hero. It's still there. Vergecast
 will come back tonight, tomorrow night, every single night until we get back.
 Vergecast is like a vampire that you can't even stake it in the heart. It doesn't have
 a heart.
 And this would be vampire...
 Because its heart was broken.
 And this is vampire weekday, of course.
 By its vampire girlfriend.
 Right. We also have Top Shelf in the afternoon, 90 and 95 times a day.
 First. Tomorrow is our last first?
 Tomorrow is our last first.
 Is that right? Oh, man.
 Well, last first of CES.
 Last first of CES. But how are we going to celebrate? We need to really think hard.
 By the way, we'll take suggestions...
 Yes.
...on ways to celebrate our final first of CES.
 First last.
 First last. Last first.
 Last first.
 First last. Last first.
 First last, first last. If you have any ideas on how to actually even say that, it would
 be great.
 Yeah, that would be really terrific.
 Anyway, those are shows. We have day two of the show floor. We're going to really look
 at the weird...
 Yeah, there's going to be more news today. We're out on the show floor. This is the day
 where we really start to find the stuff that you haven't heard about yet that maybe you
 didn't see a press conference on or that you know...
 And here's one if you don't watch CES stuff in the years past. You might have seen it.
 But we got Dante Dorazio, one of our star reporters in New York.
 This is our weird thing.
 This is our very weird... Well, just check it out.
 Yeah, a face cake. It's called face cake.
 Face cake.
 I've just stepped into a dress here at CES 2013. This is our virtual signage prototype
 that they have here from face cake. It's called the face cake swivel. We saw this last year,
 but what this is using is a connect, and they've designed this to... They've scanned these
 clothes, and the idea is that when you're walking down the street, you might see this
 signage, and you'll decide that you'd like to step into it and see what it's like.
 So if I step in, I could check out this purse, and I could add a necklace, and I could even
 switch hands.
 Face cake is hoping that retailers and other advertisers will be using these signs in malls
 and even in their front windows to get people not only to view a photograph of their clothing
 or the accessories, but they'll be able to actually try it on.
 And it's not in any stores yet at the moment, but they plan on improving it, and I'm sure
 they're shopping it around.
 The sign's based on the same technology that we saw last year from face cake, which is
 the face cake swivel, a virtual dressing room that lets you choose dresses and suits and
 ties that you'd like to try on.
 We've also announced here at CES a face cake swivel up close, which is designed for you
 to try on makeup in a very similar fashion.
 This technology itself is based off of a Kinect sensor.
 They are reading body size, and they've already created models in-house.
 They've created models of clothing and accessories, and they're mapping it onto your body.
 The sign itself is designed for retailers or advertisers that would like to not only
 show static imagery on digital signs, but they'd like to try to get people to actually
 try on these clothes without even stepping into the store.
 Of course, we haven't seen this yet in action, like in reality, but the face cake says that
 they'll keep on working on it, and they'll keep on improving it, of course.
 Swivel ran a trial of the technology this past fall at 20 Bloomingdales, and if you'd
 like to try it out yourself, we're told that they're going to start running it later this year.
 And on that note, you've officially been firsted.
 We'll see you tomorrow.