Recently I traveled to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and, as usual, it was really frickin' cool. Gadgets, giant TVs, pulsing sound (I’m looking at you, Earthquake Sound! My bowels are still vibrating!), computers, inventions, robots - it was sci-fi made real! Wandering the aisles and checking out all the new offerings with fellow geeks gave me a feeling of rightness that I seldom get outside of my home turf. And the best part is most of them want you to touch their stuff and play with it.

There was one booth, for example, showing off the Novelquest Emperor “workspace chair” - whatever! This thing was a gaming orgasm waiting to happen: three flatscreen monitors, a high end audio system installed invisibly all around you, a mounted desk area for the keyboard and mouse, and a sweet leather (maybe pleather) Recaro seat mounted on a series of things that allowed it to change its orientation with the touch of a button. All it needed was a mini-fridge and a catheter and I’d never leave it. They even let me ride around in it and play some first person shooter they had running. Oh yes, it was as sweet as it looked. Price tag? 35K.

Another booth that really jumped out at me was the - wait for it - the Microsoft booth. First off, a bunch of the guys there had iPhones, which just amused me, but from a tech standpoint, I was pretty impressed with their Windows 7 display. The demo was pretty basic, but you could experiment with it relatively freely. The coolness factor came from its touch interface. You’d move your fingers around the screen and grab windows, pull one into the forefront, flip through pages in a doc or albums in a music database. It was really cool and responsive, and honestly, I was impressed. It was similar to how the iPhone works, with lots of swipes and gentle taps, and also a bit like that Tom Cruise movie Minority Report - remember their computers and how they interfaced with them? It was kind of like that.

Across the aisle was the Intel booth, and they had their standard offerings of meaty computers with mighty processors doing crazy stuff - par for course. They also had tons of the latest buzzword items, netbooks.  Yawn. What I was really impressed by, most likely because I’m a dad now, was a little laptop built for children. Think OLPC, but pricey and with lots of cool features. This is going to be hard to describe, so my apologies, but think of a normal laptop, but thicker and a little lighter with a pretty standard keyboard, web cam on the top, etc. Where it differs from most other laptops, and actually, some can do this part too, is that the screen can swivel around on a pivot in the center so that you can spin the screen around. Then, and this is where it got really cool for me, you can spin it around backwards so that the screen is now facing the back, close the laptop and suddenly you have a touch screen tablet PC with a sensitive yet sturdy screen. I’m not an artist, so I can’t attest to its ability to draw things with the nuances one of those high-end drawing tablets, but using the included stylus allowed me to draw all kinds of stuff on the program. And you can use your fingers to grab stuff, and just interface in general with the OS (some flavor of Windows, I think).

All I could think about was how much daughter would love it!  She already thinks she can make stuff happen on my Mac by groping the screen - little does she know that Daddy is controlling the mouse - and something like this would play into her natural curiosity using her primary interface tools, her fingers. I’m pretty sure they said the MSRP was $700 or so, which, while a lot of money, would certainly be an awesome investment and worth saving some bucks for.

The most amusing experience for me happened in the Sands Convention center part of CES. I guess it’s the cheap seats. Small booths full of inventions, small companies, the Asia section where very little English was spoken, robots, and things like that. In some ways, this was my favorite part of the show. There was some serious innovation going on in there from small companies that you got the feeling worked out of their garage inventing stuff like in the “old days.” There was a little ball that was remote controlled and equipped with a video camera and a mic that allowed you to snoop places (all I could think about was how much that would have rocked in girls locker rooms back in school); a musical instrument that you played by moving your hands around in a laser field (I’m now told that something like that has been around for a while, but it was new to me); and a game/toy thing (Mind Flex) that you worked with the power of your mind.

But the funny (to me) thing that happened in the hall was at this booth (whose name I can’t remember) that had an innovative power generation machine for devices. Basically, it was a bar about a foot long that you put in your bag. As you walked, a piston or something inside it would move, creating friction which would create a charge that was stored in a battery inside it (or something like that) that you could use to charge devices like cell phones and cameras. At the time, my camera was running out of juice, so I tried to see if they’d demo the thing and charge it for me (they didn’t since they didn’t want to risk breaking it since it wasn’t a type that they’d tested it on).

As I went inside my bag to grab my camera, the booth person saw my Kindle and was like “Hey! Is that a Kindle? Let me see what kind of power plug it uses.” As I was showing it off, I could hear people behind saying “Hey, is that a Kindle?” When I turned around there was a nice little crowd of people gathering around me to check it out. I felt kind of bad since I was stealing the booths’ thunder, but it was also really funny. The booth people, on the other hand, were not as amused as I was, they gave me back my Kindle and I hastily beat feet away from there, having worn out my welcome. You’d think the CES crowd would be jaded with Kindles by now, but I guess not.