CES opens in Las Vegas. The 3 essential themes of the edition

**Connected health, Metaverse, autonomous cars, what does the Las Vegas International Technology Show have in store for us in its 2023 edition?
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The international technology trade show, CES, is back in Las Vegas this Thursday after a virtual edition in 2021, and a 2022 version disrupted by the Omicron variant. The organizers hope to reach new records this year. They expect nearly 100,000 visitors during the three days of the convention. A goal that remains modest in comparison with the last pre-pandemic edition in 2020. That year, more than 170,000 new technology enthusiasts wandered between the stands.

Nearly 3,000 exhibitors should be present this year. On the program, the inevitable giants like Amazon and Meta (formerly Facebook) but also many car manufacturers. An entire exhibition hall is dedicated to nearly 300 exhibitors from the automotive world.

Driverless cars, a technology almost ready

Many people describe the CES as an essential alternative to the Paris Motor Show. A logical development for vehicles that are increasingly loaded with technology.

This year a special place was given to autonomous vehicles. Deployed on the margins in a few cities such as San Francisco, Phoenix (Arizona), or even Las Vegas, driverless cars aim to become widespread in the coming years. Among the big names, we find Waymothe self-driving transportation service from Alphabet, Google’s parent group, Cruisethat of General Motors and Motional a group backed by South Korea’s Hyundai.

In 2019, an experiment with autonomous cars was launched in France, on the university campus of the Saclay plateau, in the Paris region. Between 2018 and 2019, teachers, students and residents could test Renault’s driverless electric cars, the Zoe CAB. But Renault-Nissan will be among the big absentees from the Las Vegas show this year.

For Anshel Sag, an analyst at technology consultancy Moor Insights and Strategy, the technologies are still a long way off: “This will be a major theme of the show. But I think if you look to 2022, a lot of the industry has really realized that AI technologies aren’t mature enough yet to allow vehicles to be fully autonomous, and some companies like Tesla won’t really be able to do that for a while.“

Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric car brand, has been repeatedly criticized for the risks associated with its autonomous driving mode.

The metaverse, a dream still maintained despite the failures of Meta

Huge star of the 2021 edition of CES, the Metaverse, this 3D virtual reality on which Internet users from all over the world could meet to work, exchange and innovate, suffered several failures during the year 2022.

The most mobilized company on the metaverse, Meta, has lost hundreds of billions of dollars on the stock market. More than 11,000 people have been made redundant. This, while Mark Zuckerberg’s company continues to spend 20% of its R&D budget on the virtual universe.

However, the Las Vegas show gives considerable exhibition space to the “Metaverse” and its support: the “web 3”.

Connected health, at the heart of concerns

Pillows to improve sleep, toilets to analyze urine at home, holograms to help surgeons: many novelties presented this Tuesday in preview of the CES, were intended to take care of our bodies.

Legacy, among other things, of more than two years of pandemic, health should be a major theme of the event according to tech analyst Avi Greengart: “We should see really interesting health gadgets that monitor or improve our well-being“.

Among the notable innovations of the 2022 edition in terms of health, the Bongiovi company had presented a remote stethoscope. An inexpensive device printed in 3D, which would improve the quality of teleconsultations in medical deserts. Another innovation, the company Omron Healthcare presented a portable blood pressure measuring device capable of carrying out electrocardiograms.