Karl Woolley at CES 2014

Each year, Framestore creative technologist Karl Woolley travels to the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with an open and eager mind to be inspired, entertained and informed about the latest in tech, talent and trends on offer at the event.

This year is no different and below he relays what has impressed from the Oculus Rift and 4K content viewing to the changing nature of intel's recruiting methods.

Advanced engineering

“Every year at CES I see the technology available to consumers becoming more sophisticated, more appealing and most importantly more affordable. There were many new potential platforms and advances of traditional ones on show this year, such as 4K TVs, wearable tech, connected home and most notably the advancements of in-car tech from BMW and Audi.

One of the big things I took away from CES was how mainstream a lot of the things we once thought to be so futuristic are. Electric cars are here, self-parking cars are here, taking photos and holding phone calls on a wristwatch that can also turn on your tumble dryer and order food for your connected fridge, that’s here too.

This poses two key challenges to the companies creating content with or for that technology. Firstly, consumers’ expectations are much higher than before due to the aforementioned sophistication of accessible, affordable technology, so you need to work harder to impress.

Speed of change

Secondly, some of this technology empowers smaller niche/boutique advertising agencies to produce content that was previously only available to the big houses with proprietary and expensive kit. This challenge is not a new one for established content creators – since the early Final Cut and MacBook days, competition in the post arena has been stiff.

Hardware has come on a lot too – a project we did in the last 18 months required a high-end graphics card from Nvidia to do photo-real product renders, but now it can be achieved on a tiny mobile embeddable chip from Nvidia, called the Tegra K1. This new chip can provide impressive graphics to its inbuilt multi-touch screen using a negligible amount of power, whilst being able to stream at 4K to another display. Things are changing fast.­­­

Digital developmetns

Many developers get to see a lot of this technology before it reaches shows like CES. At Framestore we try to keep ahead of the latest tech developments by working closely with the manufacturers to develop their hardware and software for all our markets, whether that’s film, advertising or digital.

We developed some ground-breaking and award-winning technology to produce the jaw-dropping visuals in Gravity last year. That technology included a combination of proprietary and custom facial and body tracking kit, which our digital team is already condensing and economising for use in advertising and experiential/digital projects.

The young and the revamped old

Every now and then a unique piece of tech, software or talent presents itself to CES. Unquestionably for me this year, it was Intel's proud announcement of their youngest ever employee: Joey Hudy, who is just 16 years old.

Joey is probably best known for his innovative marshmallow air cannon that he showed to Barack Obama at a White House science fair, he's something of a technologist and entrepreneur, building, developing and selling micro tech solutions based on Arduino. It's therefore no surprise, despite his age, that Intel has snapped him up!

Alongside Joey, Oculus Rift stole the show where consumer grade hardware is concerned. The Rift started out life as another one of those tech projects on Kickstarter, but this one quickly raised its funds and some more to boot.

Much like 3D, virtual reality is going through a re-birth at the moment, only this time the guys at Oculus Rift have nailed it. They've been able to adapt and react quickly to initial developer feedback, raised $75m in VC funding and brought a huge upgrade in terms of performance and quality to CES this year. We've been using the Rift at Framestore and we’re really excited about continuing our relationship with them.

Resolution solution

There was the usual plethora of TV sets and projectors at CES. 4K was absolutely everywhere, much like HD a few years ago. Unlike with HD, I believe 4K will be adopted quickly, and I put that down to the way we now consume a lot of our media: digitally and on demand.

Netflix will have 4K content available from February this year! The stumbling block that HD had was the price of TV sets, but there are already 50” 4K sets available from two large manufactures for just under $1000 so I can see it taking off a lot quicker.

That’s great for consumers but it does pose a challenge to content creators, although I don't see 4K as a massive obstacle for us or our peers. We've known for a while we'll need faster storage and higher disk density.

The main challenge in being able to stay ahead is how you use new consumer and pro-level innovations like those on show at CES. You need to adopt and integrate with them, or get left behind.”