The Future Of Live: The Coolest Things We Saw And Heard That Exploded Our Brains At CES 2024

Yes, there was a flying car.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, really. The Consumer Electronics Show — the annual four-day Las Vegas cavalcade of the newest gadgetry — is always brimming with ripped-from-The-Jetsons technology.

So, yes, there was a flying car, in addition to smart toilets (your guess is as good as mine), an AI fortune teller (your philosophical crisis is as good as mine) and eye-glazing chatter about blockchains and metaverses and reality — virtual, augmented and, well, just normal old fleshy, carbon-based reality.

CES can be a lot to take in. It spans not just the Las Vegas Convention Center — at 2.5 million square feet, one of the world’s largest event spaces — but convention space at a half dozen Vegas Strip resorts.

It is a noisy cacophony of the languages of the world, a maelstrom of colors and glitz, a surging crowd of techno-optimism.

And, well, it’s pretty damn cool.

The interesting thing about CES is the mix of fanciful futurism and earthy practicality.

Consider, for example, Sound Drive, a collaboration between Mercedes Benz and Black Eyed Peas founder, multi-time Grammy winner and tech-embracer Will.i.am.

Electric cars are quiet. So quiet some drivers experience a sort of sensory unease because the vehicles lack the hum and gurgle of fossil-fuel vehicles. Manufacturers have come up with all kinds of ways to counteract this and Sound Drive is the next version of it. Essentially, it takes the driver’s inputs — acceleration, turning, braking and so forth — and uses them to remix the music being played in the car, producing a different experience every time you drive. Theoretically, listening to “Radar Love” while driving 75 through the Mojave will sound different than it would on your stop-and-go trip to the grocery store (your child will still be embarrassed by your singing either way).

Yes, that is very cool and, yes, it is unclear who was asking for this.

But just around the corner in the section of the convention hall dedicated to the newest in automotive technology, were some very practical, very important innovations with very real implications for the touring industry.

The restiveness of the weirdly quiet experience of driving an electric vehicle is really a picayune concern in the grand scheme of things. The nut the industry really wants to crack is building a battery that can reliably power larger vehicles used for touring — box trucks and semis. 

And right next to the flying car, looming over it, really, was a Peterbilt 579EV, an all-electric semi with 536 continuous horsepower, competitive with its diesel-fuel siblings. PACCAR — Peterbilt’s parent company — actually debuted the model last year, though this year’s version is more aerodynamic and includes improvements in on-board automation. With a range of 150 miles and a three-hour charging time, it’s not quite the long-haul solution, but incremental improvements year-over-year hint that it won’t be long before electric tractor-trailers are viable for a national tour.

Because they require shorter trips and lighter towing capacity, medium-duty electric trucks are already competitive spec-wise. Bollinger’s all-electric 18-footer can handle four tons of payload, pulling 363 horsepower with a 200 mile range, for example. 

With artists and festival promoters looking for — and sometimes, insisting upon — increasingly sustainable options in what’s historically been an industry with a deep carbon footprint, expect to hear the hum of an all-electric box truck hauling amps at festival grounds sometime soon.

There were plenty of small-bore green solutions scattered about the trade show with fairly obvious live applications. 3M, for example, was showing off wireless radio-intercom headsets that could be recharged with solar power and ambient light.

South Korea’s SK Group created an indoor pseudo-theme-park dubbed SK Wonderland, showcasing what a world of net-zero carbon output might look like. At the center of it all was a 20-foot spherical LED screen, a much (much) smaller version of the world’s most technologically advanced concert venue looming over Vegas a mile and a half away. 

There’s no expectation that such a screen would have much domestic use — it would be virtually impossible to keep up with the Super Bowl or an episode of “The Great British Baking Show” on such a set-up — but it doesn’t take a lot of squinting and brainstorming to see how it might fly during a concert performance.

Screens now come in every conceivable shape and nearly every conceivable size. Samsung’s newest low-reflectivity, micro-LED screen is called The Wall because it could — for roughly a quarter-million dollars — cover any size wall there is.

The takeaway isn’t that touring productions or venues could use those specific screens necessarily, it’s that the technology is available and will soon, following the trajectory of every technology ever, be scalable.

Virtually invisible holographic screens — some of them with the capability of being bent and flexed into waves and twists and cylinders — were a hot item, as well. The clarity and definition were astounding; the experience of seeing through a screen that was displaying an image was dumbfounding. 

Imagine a concert staged in the round employing such a screen as an appurtenance to the performance. Production designers must be giddy at the possibilities.

But again, the most compelling technology in the audiovisual sector was one that has such sensible utility, it seems rather baffling it didn’t already exist.

Bluetooth Special Interest Group — the standards group for Bluetooth technology and devices — rolled out Auracast.

The long and short of it is that with the new standard, a Bluetooth transmitter will be able to broadcast to an unlimited number of receivers. On the receiving end, a user will be able to toggle between numerous broadcasters seamlessly and, in some cases, remain connected to numerous ones simultaneously. To borrow the example Bluetooth SIG used during its demonstration: imagine sitting in an airport bar and switching between the audio of two different sporting events being shown on the TVs, while simultaneously being connected to the audio from your gate so you can hear your boarding announcement. Want to watch a movie on your buddy’s laptop? Auracast allows both you and your friend to receive the signal (password protection is available) and watch the film without having to do the now-common practice of passing earbuds back and forth.

In the live space, the technology has a myriad of possible uses. A comedy show in English could be simultaneously translated and piped out to Auracast users in Spanish, for example. For the hard of hearing — who Bluetooth SIG officials say are often among the first users consulted when rolling out a new standard — the concert experience becomes more navigable. 

Ever been to a festival and wanted to hear a band, but you were just too worn out to stand up for another set? Click on the appropriate broadcast and rest your weary legs far from the madding crowd. Or stand in the middle of the festival ground and click between all the shows going on around you. 

One musician suggested a venue could, for the audiophiles in the crowd, offer to Auracast the board mix. 

Bluetooth officials told Pollstar the Aura-cast hardware — transmitters and receivers
— is available now and that adoption and uptake is underway and should be imple-
mented fairly broadly by the end of 2024 and soon thereafter will be ubiquitous enough to simply be regarded as the standard-fare Bluetooth.

It’s not a flying car, but unlike the airborne auto, it’s going to be part of your life in the foreseeable future.