Intel at CES: All About Wearable, Mobile Computing Devices

by Jeffrey Burt

Krzanich holds up an Edison computer, which is housed in an SD card form factor and comes with built-in wireless. The computer, which is based on Intel’s 22-nanometer Quark chips, can be the basis for a new wave of products. It will become available this summer, he said.

Intel introduced the Quark family of chips at the Intel Developer Forum in September, targeting the small, low-power processors at the Internet of things and wearable devices.

At CES, Krzanich introduced a reference design for a hands-free, smart headset that can integrate with existing personal assistant technologies.

Intel’s reference design for a smart wireless charging bowl can simultaneously charge the smart headset and other mobile devices by simply dropping them into the bowl.

Rest Devices, which makes the Mimo smart baby onesie, is using the Edison computer to make the wearable monitor more efficient. With the Edison, all the functionalities were able to fit into a turtle-shaped sensor that is attached to a onesie, eliminating the need for an external receiver.

Engineers at Intel Labs and Rest Devices created an Edison-based smart coffee mug with a display that shows the data generated from the smart baby onesie, which monitors the baby’s vitals and analyzes the data.

Rest Devices’ onesie also sends data to a smart bottle warmer that will start warming the milk when the onesie monitor senses the baby is awake and hungry. With Edison, Rest was able to reduce the size of the smart bottle warmer by half.

Mooly Eden, senior vice president and general manager for perceptual computing at Intel, holds the company’s RealSense 3D camera, a tiny, integrated user-facing 3D camera that enables devices to see depth in a fashion similar to the human eye.

On site at CES are early systems from Asus, Lenovo and Dell that come integrated with Intel’s RealSense 3D camera.

Eden and Justine Ezarik show journalists and analysts at CES how the RealSense 3D camera will help video bloggers, including enabling them to remove their background to create a green-screen-like effect and create their own background. In this demonstration, Ezarik’s background is the Las Vegas Strip rather than the stage at the Mandalay Bay hotel.

CEO Brian Krzanich demonstrated an Asus Transformer Book Duet (TD 300), a two-in-one device that can run both Windows and Android, with users being able to toggle between the two operating systems.