How a Consumer Technology Show Turns Professional at Showstoppers

Showstoppers gave the media a chance to see some technologies aimed at business professionals that otherwise might have been lost in the chaos of CES 2017.

The Z2 Mini from HP is dramatically smaller than any other workstation in its class, measuring only 8.5 inches square and 2.28 inches thick. It’s designed to be mounted flat on a desktop or attached to the rear of a monitor or under a desk. It can support up to six monitors. Here, one of the cooling fans is flipped up for a view of the interior.

The two most obvious features inside HP’s Z2 Mini are the fans, which cool the Xeon processor and the other components using two fans. The fans are engineered for efficiency and low noise output. Here, the fans are in place. On the rear of the Z2 Mini are four DisplayPort connectors, four USB connectors, an Ethernet port and an optional RS-232 serial port (which, yes, is still available).

HP’s Sprout 3D scanner was designed originally for individual creative users interested in design and was an immediate hit with enthusiasts of 3D printing. HP has redesigned the Sprout, reissuing it as the Sprout Pro G2, for commercial applications. Here you can see the beginning of a scan, and you’ll see that only part of the model is being rendered on the screen.

The user turns the model under the lens of the Sprout Pro, bringing more and more of the object into the 3D image the device is building. Here, the Sprout Pro is showing the completed object including all surface markings. But you’ll notice the hands of the operator are not in the image—the Sprout Pro knows not to render anything that’s not in the picture all the time. This image is now ready for the 3D printer.

Wacom PR Manager Francie King demonstrates the company’s new plain paper digitizing pad, the Intuos Pro Paper Edition. The tablet works with the Finetip gel ink pen and the Wacom Inkspace app to allow users to create digitized drawings. Intuos Pro Paper, which comes in medium and large sizes, eliminates the workflow normally associated with converting hand-drawn images into digital representations.

The Qnap TVS-1282T3 is a network-attached storage server for small and midsize businesses that will satisfy most storage needs. It has room for eight SATA drives plus four SSD storage devices for caching. Equipped with 2TB drives in each slot, the TVS-1282T3 can hold up to 16TB. The device supports two Thunderbolt 3 ports, two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and either Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors.

This pair of custom-molded earbuds may not look like much, but the prosaic exterior belies the powerful audio features that work together to produce a sort of virtual reality for hearing. The InspEar by Laboratoire Cotral is designed to reduce surrounding noise by up to 30 decibels to enable users listen to their own music and other audio programming with very high fidelity. In addition, it allows the user to decide which outside sounds to allow through and which to block through active noise reduction. It also includes the ability to control voice services including personal assistants and other voice-controlled capabilities ranging from real-time translation to real-time directions and more.

The model in this photo is wearing what may be the most advanced hearing device for use by military and police forces currently available. Laboratoire Cotral developed the device, named “Bang,” at the request of the French and German military. The hearing device provides active noise reduction for both ambient noise and for explosive noises including gunfire and works through the rectangular control box to integrate communications, assistive sounds, real-time translation and other audible data.

Audio technology company Stages is bringing new thinking to hearing protection with its headphone designs. The company’s Hero headphones and Sidekick microphones—the hockey puck-shaped device—protects hearing in a business or industrial environment, yet allows users to stay in touch with coworkers or hear important sounds from the environment. Either device can be set to allow specific sounds or specific people’s voices to come through, or they can be set to allow sound only from specific directions. These devices can also be set to receive ambient sounds from anywhere.