CES 2026: Fuji's Fake 8mm Camera, LEGO Smart Bricks, Atlas Robot, and More

CES 2026 brought notable innovations for filmmakers and media professionals. In this episode, we break down the most interesting tech: Fujifilm's new instax mini Evo Cinema Camera with vintage film emulation, LEGO's impressive computer-integrated Smart Brick, HP's EliteBoard keyboard computer, Boston Dynamics' fully electric Atlas robot, Samsung's thin 3D display technology, and Nvidia's Rubin platform advances. 

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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are the personal views of the hosts and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their respective employers or organizations. This show is independently produced by VP Land without the use of any outside company resources, confidential information, or affiliations.

Transcript

All right. Welcome back to de Nos. In this episode, let's talk about all the cool things that we saw come out of CES in the film and technology space. Ready, Addy? Let's do it. Let's go.

Alright. Welcome back to Denoised. Uh, we're here in the new year. First episode back, sort of, I mean, we had our predictions, but it's, it was the first time We're actually recording in the new year. So good to see you, Addy. 

Yeah, good to see you too. Thanks for, uh, commenting on our predictions, everyone. Yeah, it was feedback.

It was a lot of fun making that 

episode. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how things pan out over the next 12 months. All. So yeah, CES happened. Neither of us went this year, but uh, we've been tracking some stuff online to kind of see some of the news that came out. Obviously everything at CES consumer electronic shows, so more on the consumer end.

Nothing that I saw that was like amazing for the. Professional film industry and, but a couple cool things and trends. So yeah, the first one that is the most camera specific thing is a new camera from Fujifilm, the Instax mini Evo camera, cinema camera. It's a hybrid insta camera. Oof. Great name that I can't pronounce.

I think how to, I thought I had another name. No instax mini Evo. Okay. Anyways, this camera seems definitely modeled off the kind of super eight old school cameras. It's got the pistol grip, it's got the pistol grip, it's got that kind of narrow body design, but it's got a couple modern things, so it's a hybrid.

Still in video camera and the thing that was getting a lot of traction has a little dial where you can pick and choose what type of era film you wanna replicate. 

It's, it's like custom built for, yeah. Gen Z and under 

right Whitney. And it has a built in. Printer. So you could also take photos and print photos, which I know is also a very popular trend.

Yeah. Fujifilm has products that do that. So yeah, this is an extension of that, if you, if I'm guessing. 

Yeah. So, uh, it's called the era, the Aris tour. It's called the Aris Dial. And, uh, it features 10 eras, uh, such as 1960, inspired by eight millimeter film cameras in the 1960s and 1970s era. So you pick the era and it replicates a film stock.

Obviously it's a fun kind of toy gimmick. If you were shooting something for real and you wanted it to emulate a specific film stock look or era, you would. Shoot it normally and then post-process it later. 'cause you don't wanna bake in these looks and settings as you're filming. 

Yeah. And let's keep in mind, like Fuji film has been making film stock Yeah.

Since the 1970s and and so on. And they have some legendary film stock looks already. So they, you know, they have the expertise in-house hopefully to get these looks right. 

I'd be curious. How, if, you know, you could take a, a professional colorist or something, you take like actual stuff shot on Fuji film, film stuff from that era, and then stuff shot with this camera that mimics it.

Like how, how well they match up if it actually does emulate that, uh, specific, uh, Fuji film stuff. 

I mean like eight millimeter film wasn't as capable as let's say 16 or 35 millimeter film, right? It was like, you know, it would tend to blow out a lot and was very grainy and there was not a lot, a lot of detail.

So if you're mimicking eight millimeter film, I think a small sensor on this camera is probably good enough to do so. But again, film usually outperforms digital sensors most of the time. 

Yeah. I mean, it also depends on how you scan it, but yeah, you get, you have the resolutions there. Mm-hmm. You're actually talking about resolution.

What? I'm gonna guess it's just regular hd. I don't even know what it is. 

Yeah, and it looks like it's really, because it's like a pistol grip. It's really built for like vertical videos. I don't know. 

I mean, wait, seems, are you saying the pistol grip seems like it's like geared for eight millimeter cameras in the sixties, they were shooting vertical video in the six with their pistol.

They couldn't, they had no idea that would be the future. Right. Like, but like this stuff turn the protector sideways. It seems really like if I was Fuji Film, I would build it. So it goes right into like Instagram or TikTok, like right. Upload to it, you know? 

Yeah. It's got some app that connects with it too, and, and yeah.

I'm sure the app will send stuff directly to Instagram. Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems to target the kind of Gen Z nostalgia trend. It's a toy, but it looks like a fun toy. 

I'll take it though, because in the, in the age of where we're questioning if something is synthetic or not, you know, I'll take a bunch of creators, you know, doing a vintage look.

Video capture and then using that as a creative output. 

Yeah. And something that kind of does it in the product right there. It's not like, oh let me, I mean we're talking about let's film it and like post-process it later as part of a professional pipeline. Right. But when you're a creator and just having fun, the less kind of actual computery stuff you have to do, like the more it keeps you kind of in the moment.

Exactly like how many people are like us who are tinkering and resolved with color of notes used for. 

Film emulator, plugins to accurately, yeah. This is like a five click process. Yeah. The grain, the grain characteristics here just aren't, aren't up to par. 

I, I, I think the professional of the, of the groups will probably kind of say, eh.

It's a toy, it's a gimics. I think there's a, it's a, it's a good push because it kind of correlates with like the, uh, sinners release, the odyssey release and all the film releases that are coming up. Like there's a resurgence in this vintage look and feel. Mm-hmm. 

Yeah. Maybe like, uh, red or aria release, uh, consumer level IMEX replication camera.

Yeah. If ARRI can figure out that bankruptcy situation. Yeah. 

All right. Speaking of more toys, this one. This one's pretty awesome. LEGO announced a new smart brick. So it is basically a two by four. They're standard two by four brick, but it has a built-in computer system in the brick, and it could also connect with other LEGO characters and some other LEGO pieces that have NFC smart tags inside them.

And it basically turns this brick into. This sound and light emitting detection system, so you can put the brick on a car, it starts making car noises. If it hits like a person or like a wall, it kind of detects that it makes a crash sound, so it's. This super next level way of taking LEGOs, which like I was obsessed with LEGOs and making, bringing some like interaction to it, but without a phone or without any other kind of computer system.

Did you say without phone? I'm in. I know, because, yeah. I remember a few years ago LEGO was doing this kind of like AR thing where it was like you could build a LEGO set, right? But then you could load an app on your phone and like kind of make it come to life. But it's like, eh, and you still gotta bring the phone out and that kind of ruins the fun of LEGOs.

But this is like very. Tactile, hands-on. Uh, still keeps it fun or still keeps it like, you know, real. I would love to 

play around with this. 

Yeah. Uh, lemme find, lemme 

know when you buy a set demo video. 

Yeah. Here's one of the 

demo videos. Oh, wow. So it's got like, uh, I'm guessing a bunch of, uh, NFC, RFID stuff built into an individual brick into other parts like that little with its own 

compute flat piece was like a thing that detected it.

And then the character, it could detect. 

I mean, the miniaturization of it is mind-boggling. I, it's a standard LEGO piece, you know, 'cause, uh. Yeah. Like our duino or you know, you know, raspberry pie is not even that small. Yeah. So they've had to go into custom chip development, I'm guessing? Yeah. To put all of these bricks, bricks together.

Yeah. I mean, here's sort of like this animated cutaway of the brick. And so, and it also, it doesn't, I don't think it has a microphone, so it also doesn't, uh, here from trunk, LEGO built its own. Oh, wow. Yeah. 

The, the guy has a, like his torso is all computer. 

Yeah. So some of these. Characters will have NFC tags, so it'll detect it.

Also the, the multiple smart bricks can make a Bluetooth mesh network and they can tell the position and direction of the bricks and they can trigger crash. Sounds like if a brick hits the wall. Wow. Or if you have multiple, like bricks as cars, it could detect like which car wins the race. 

Yeah. If you throw these bricks into your regular LEGO dump, like the big pile of regular LEGOs, you have.

Yeah, you're not finding them. That's a, that's awesome though. Uh, do you know any, have any idea how much it costs or how much, I don't know how much it cost in pricing. 

Yeah. I wonder if you like step on this brick if it makes like an ow sound. 

The age old LEGO of brick. 

I mean, I'm old enough to remember, remember the very first smart brick system?

I mean, I'm calling it Smart Brick. It wasn't called that. It was called like a Mindstorm and it was like a computer brick. Yeah. That you can program. Yeah. I had this as a kid. This was old ass man. This thing was like 20 bucks. Now you could buy it for $7 on eBay. 

I mean, look how big and clunky that was.

Yeah. And that one you def, you couldn't even do anything on its own. You had to like load their computer software. It had this little like USB infrared plug that you would like point to the front of this thing and that's how you would like load the program onto it. But I remember people built some wild stuff with this, like, uh.

Photocopier where it would like, you'd put like two pages on top of each other and it would like detect the writing and then like put down a pen and like draw it. Whoa. Yeah. People built some crazy, some crazy stuff. There was like a robotics, try to build like a car that could drive itself. Yeah, yeah. You know, LEGO is like that 

one company that never really lost their way.

Like they've always innovated, but they've always been original in themselves. It's, it's pretty cool. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, especially with the LEGO movie, which was like off really good and they, they've, yeah, they've, they've kept it consistent. 

They have IP now they have like Ninjago and a bunch of other things.

Yeah, 

yeah. Alright. Also other LEGO thing that was cool. Not really a product you can buy, but this is probably the coolest use of the sphere. They turned the sphere into a giant LEGO death star and then had these LEGO X-Wing fighters available for people to sit in. And then they're PI people are it? It seems like people are piloting the X Star playing a video game, but then that video game's also Projective live onto the sphere, which is crazy.

Wow. On the outside display. On the outside display, which is far easier. Yeah. Yeah. I, I heard that the outside display is only a 10 80 p resolution. Really? Yeah. Well, it's not like each, each pixel is like, you know, size of your head. 

That's true. 

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you could actually see it on the, have you seen the Marty Supreme Pro?

Yeah. Where he stands on it. Where Chala on top of the sphere. Yeah. Yeah. So when, when he's standing, you could see how far apart those pixels are. Yeah. They're like, you know, I don't know, six feet apart or something, and insane like that. 

Yeah. All right. Well LEGO lends itself well to, uh, something that's a procure resolution.

It is. But you're also saying like, to have this live update, it is easier to do on the outside 'cause you don't have to push so many pixels. That's it. 

Yeah. And uh, it's a fairly, uh, sort of. Fairly easy geometry to wrap around. Like it's, it's just a lap long wraparound atmosphere, you know? 

Yeah. Like the death star, so, um, like the death 

Star.

Yeah, it is awesome. Look trench run on the sphere, like that's, that's super cool. That's a cool use. Yeah, 

absolutely. Yeah. 

And it seems like multiplayer and the player locations were updating on the sphere. I don't know if that's actual real time like position or if that was just sort of like a prebuilt thing, but.

It's pretty cool. 

I, I would, I don't see why not. I mean if it's, it's most likely built in Unreal engine, I'm guessing and, um, you know, Unreal's just. Really made to be. It's a game engine. You can build a multiplayer game game quite easily with all of the building blocks. Yep. 

Yeah. And as far as multiplayer, game sculptures is pretty basic.

Like just track three. Three objects. 

Yeah. 

Very cool. All right, next up. This was a new product from HP that is called, I saw this, the elite board. And so it's basically a full on desktop computer that's just built into the keyboard. And so it's just a keyboard sized computer and you plug it into a monitor, bring a USB mouse or a a Bluetooth mouse, and you have your whole computer system.

That's incredible. 

I don't know why we didn't think of this like 10 years ago. 

I mean, I think they thought of this 40 years ago with the Commodore 64 or whatever, or the Apple two C or whatever. That's right. That's right. We come full circle. Yeah. I mean, one of the, in this uh, PC Mag article, it was like, sort of the idea was a lot of people just, they have the laptops, but then they just kinda take their laptop from home to work, plug it into an external monitor and keyboard, and never really use the laptop as a laptop.

So this sort of just cuts out the display, it cuts out the extra stuff that people might not use, and then you just sort of have your portable computer. On the go. 

Do you have any idea of specs? What kind of GPU we're looking at? 

No, it didn't really say in this article. I mean, the one thing is it's sort of branded as a AI computer, which I don't, whatever 

that means.

You know what, um, there was a photo of this that with the sort of the back open and you could see a giant fan and possibly a, like a full size GPU or close to it. 

Yeah. Lemme show that five in sec. I'm just gonna see if there's any, um, yeah. If I could see any specs. Elite 4G one, next Gen A IPC. Yeah. Man, 

HP gets slept on.

They, they consistently turn out really awesome products, and they're always high quality at, at least at the upper price range. Uh, but it's HP it's, it's like not a sexy brand, you know? 

Yeah. But they're just, they've been there kinda like IBM they've just been around forever. 

Yeah. 

They're there like a 

lot of the monitors.

I, I use HP Z displays, which are solid monitors. Yeah. Yeah. There. That's the picture. 

Yeah. So there's a cutout. Yeah. I mean, you got the cooling system. You got SSD drive ram, it's an A MD chip. Mm-hmm. 

Yeah. See that giant fan in the middle? That's either for the CP or the GPU, but that's a substantial fan. And here's the front.

I mean, it's cool idea. I mean, obviously you're not gonna do any heavy duty like graphic stuff on this, but this is a cool idea for a different interpretation. Sort of in the same realm as like the, uh, the MAC Minis. 

Yeah, I was just gonna say, this is like their answer to the Mac Mini. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And now if they have like a display that goes hand in hand with this, something that's also like a, a little bit more mobile, a little bit smaller footprint, I think that would be a really nice pair.

Or if you could pair this with like a tablet or something, or some Oh, yeah. Other display. Either that or like, um, any of the smart glasses or something like that. That'd be another unlock another feature. Oh, now you're thinking. Yeah, I'm thinking, yeah. Dude. 26. You're, you're way more innovative. Reimagine, computering.

Think tank, Joey. Yeah. 

All right. Other one Robot updates, a new Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. 

Oh man, I've been following this one. I am obsessed. Um, I These robots are so freaking cool. 

Yeah, I mean, look at this thing. Move. It looks, it's, well, that's a, I think that's a, a cg but let me, uh, this live demo. 

Yeah, show it like getting up from the floor.

'cause it has 360 degree hinges. Yeah, and rotation joints, so like it can completely turn its torso around, its hips and knees and everything. I think this one does that. Yeah. So the arms, yeah, that's pretty cool. It's kind of creepy, but it's cool. It's creepy. There's a torso. Yeah. But then no, when it gets down on the floor, fingers 

fully back, fully back and forth.

So the way like, uh, it goes back and forth is it just turns body back and forth. It doesn't have to actually. Yeah. Like that. Yeah. It's 

sort of like, oh, 

that's crazy. 

Yeah. 

It's very black mirror 

for sure. Yeah. As this, uh, future death machine comes towards you and just rotate its arms. Dude, this thing can 

run.

Uh, there's a video of this, like it's running and dancing. It's, it's quite agile, 

I bet. All right. So some of the specs, it has a four hour battery life. Six feet, two inches tall. Weighs about 200 pounds, 56 total degrees of freedom. It is now fully electric. Uh, no hydraulic systems, which were on the older version.

A hundred to 10 pound weight capacity can reach up to 7.5 feet. Brain is powered by NVIDIA chips. Which I think it also Google's DeepMind AI models are also being integrated. 

Yeah. The important thing here is that it's not a program robot per se, but this is a learning robot. Mm-hmm. So like, if it doesn't know a task.

You can actually show it the task. Like, hey, fold my laundry like this. And it'll kind of figure it out just from you doing it. Yeah. Which is nuts. That's cool. 

And yeah, I mean we, so this came up the other, the older Atlas robot, we did that episode, I don't know, like last summer on that demo where it was filming and operating with like a gimbal on set.

Yeah. In a VP stage. Um, on a VP stage. Yeah. And, um. I remember we sort of had that discussion of like, if you're building robots for stuff, like why make them humanoid? But then it became obvious where it's like every, it's the easiest for the robot to integrate with how the world, it's already built. 'cause everything's already built for humans.

And so if you build a robot with that same design as a human, it could, you don't have to modify stuff. Mm-hmm. For it, you could just automatically use it. So it could just grab a gimbal or grab a camera and. Operate theoretically smoothly. Yeah, 

it can sit on your office chair and do your job. Yeah, just kidding.

Listen, uh, the, the thing that's to be mentioned here is that Boston Dynamics is, I believe first customer is Hyundai, like the car company and the, the big industrial company. And they were showing examples of this thing like picking up an entire. Side of a car and then giving it to like a welder to weld it in.

There we go into place. Yeah, like that's pretty cool. That's a, I mean, for a human to repeatedly do that task, they would have some long-term injury, right? Like nobody's gonna lift an entire panel of a car. 

Yeah. I mean, yeah, 110 isn't, I mean, that's a lot of amount, but also like that's such an awkwardly shaped 110 pounds that.

It's not like, oh, I'm just like picking up a heavy box. That's like a very weirdly shaped thing that maybe someone could do like once, but to do that all day. Yeah, exactly. It's too repetitive and exhausting for a person. 

Yeah. I mean this is, look, this just makes it so clear to me that the robots are gonna come for us.

Not like in a offensive way, but robots are coming to take a lot of repetitive, monotonous jobs sooner than you think. 

Yeah. And also, you know, going back to that where I was understanding this is like, this is what the AI world models, video models, this is, this is the road they're leading to. You know, making the videos is cool, but this is the bigger market of like, how do robots understand the world?

Yeah. And look, we didn't get here overnight. Like Boston Dynamics have been, they have been showing the robot, not just Atlas, but the, the dog one for over a decade, right? Mm-hmm. So the robotics mechanical technology has been evolving since then, and NVIDIA's been building world models and mm-hmm. All types of optimization for their learning AI for over a decade.

And so these things are just coming into fruition. At the same time, we're experimenting with image and video generation and LLMs and all the things that's happening. So it feels like everything's hitting us at once. But these were all sort of origin storied back to over a decade ago. 

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

All right. Next up actually. So these are camera specific updates. Not a lot, but this is a grab bag of some stuff from a tech radar roundup. I won't cover, you know, technically it's a camera, but bird buddy, two mini, a bird feeder camera that can see and hear birds. That that was released. Technically a camera not shooting any, uh, maybe that'll shoot Planet Earth or something.

But no, this one is, there's a new action camera from the robot, vacuum manufacturer. Dreame. They launched a modular action camera, a small modular AK action camera called the Dreame Leaptic Cube. How is it special? Good question. Uh, it's especially the same categories about Osmo Nano. Oh, it's self leveling.

The DJI Osmo. The DJI. The Osmo. It was like DJI Insta 360 GoPro Camp thing. Yeah. 

I mean, like in the day where. Everybody's smartphone has a really decent camera on it, and that's doing image utilization and all that stuff. You really need to have a very specific reason to buy another camera and then put it in your pocket.

Yeah, I mean, most of these action cams, it's like your. Doing, you know, an action sport or something where underwater skiing, biking, you know, the thing that kind of GoPro found at Sweet Spot and then kind of, I mean, GoPro's got really good and then I was like, well, you buy the GoPro and then they're really good cameras.

And it's like, well, what do I need to buy? Like, what do I need to buy the next GoPro for? And kind of similar with these things, I mean, it looks like it has a much bigger screen. Don't. It's not clear if these break apart. It's like a camera. Like Like a little square. Oh, like the modular little camera? 

Yeah.

Yeah. It doesn't, every photo has 'em together. So that's also kind of weird 'cause it just makes it big and bulky. 

I could see the Fuji Film one ticking off. Like that's a very specific thing that you can't get with smartphones. 

That's for being out and about. It's fun. It's good. It also looks cool and it's stylized cool party.

It's like, yeah, exactly. It prints, photos, you know, so you can actually make something tangible when you're like out and about. Yeah. I dunno, this doesn't, looking at this even more where I don't think this monitor, they haven't, they haven't showed me any demos where it breaks off. Um, that just makes it even weirder.

Less useful. So now it's just like a big bulky action cam. I don't see it. I dunno. I don't quite get the point. I mean, the DJI stuff's good, but I mean, as far as action cam goes, like the Insta grid has been. My go-to for anything I would've used a GoPro for like five years ago. Mm-hmm. Because it just, mm-hmm.

The quality's really good and just shoots everything and then you can just reframe it later so you don't have to worry about, oh, did like, we get the right angle in the car. 'cause most of the time with GoPro and filming, you just kind of have to set it up and hope that you set it up at the right angle and hope you captured it.

Has no three cameras, you're just like, you're just like, yeah, we got it all. So we can just, yeah. Figure it out later. And then let's see what else we got. Okay. This one I've been seeing, I saw a couple demos popping around the Richie Mini, so this is a, this is sort of like a fun robot from hugging face and some other companies.

Wait, hugging 

face 

the, 

the 

AI 

repository. Yeah. Okay. The open source robot for today and tomorrow's AI builders. But they announced this, this was announced last summer, but now it's actually, I don't, I still don't know if it's fully out yet, but it's. There were demos and people playing with it at CES. 

So it's like a pet robot, like one you keep at home.

It's more like a, I think it's like a learning, like a programmable Oh, learning robot. AI robot that you Oh, that's like a raspberry. Oh, okay. Yeah. Like a raspberry pie for AI kind of thing. 

So what Comfy is gonna drop a robot next. 

That's how they're gonna make their money. Yeah.

Subscription model robot. It's a Comfy robot, but it's, its ambition is to keep you Comfy and it like, makes you coffee and it gets you a blanket. Gets you a blanket. 

Uh, I ha, I thought I had a demo link saved. Let me, that is pretty cool now that I think about it like a robot that you can upload new ai.

Models into and have it learn and sort of learn from its mistakes and get better with robotics, um, models, I guess. 

Yeah, if you 

Yeah, there, there's the, there's this, this guy is doing exactly what I'm talking about. 

Yeah. If you're like, you don't have the money for the atlas, but you wanna mess around with.

Yeah. Programming robots as a hobby or as a learning process? I think this is what this is for. 

Yeah. I, I think in, in that realm of like a DIY robot, if you will, uhhuh, the best option right now is the unit tree, which is the Chinese robot I've shared, yeah. Clip of the Unitree with you before. It's, it's a, it looks like a skinnier, smaller brother of Atlas and I think it's only, I mean, it's not cheap, but.

A robot is cheap. It's $16,000 and it'll ship like from Alibaba or like a Chinese website. 

Oh, okay. Oh wait, is that, is that the one, it's like a mini humanoid robot, right? 

Yeah. It looks like, um, like a poor man's version of the atlas. Is that the one where 

the guy kicked himself in the balls with it? Yes.

The 

mocap robot. Yeah. So there were using Yeah, that one. Yeah. Unit trees are used a lot for testing. 

Uh, he, he learned, he learned about testing and p where to position yourself. You may never walk again,

but I think the funniest part of that clip was the robot. Bending over in pain 'cause he was bending over in pain. Oh 

yeah. 'cause it was mimicking the Moab data because it 

was mimicking him. Yeah. 

You gotta show the viewers the video now. Sorry guy. 

I know. We'll find, we'll, we'll pull the, we'll, we'll show the video.

Okay. 

All right. Uh, let's see. A couple other random ones. Yeah, just a couple other like last random ones. Samsung demoed a new 3D display. Oh, that's cool. This one we can see it's like. Looks super flat. Like it's flat as a regular display. And in this demo it's tracking their position and you see, looks like, uh, you know, 

yeah, it's, it's a lenticular display that's tracking the, the, um, the viewer's eyes essentially.

Yeah, this is nothing new call, 

but, um, 

spatial signage. Spatial signage. It's 

much more portable. Right. Because ev every, hasn't everything else before that's been like huge. Way bigger. Yeah. Clunky. 

This chunky. Yeah. And also this is big, like the previous lenticular stuff is maybe, you know, 30 inch, 40 inch tops.

Like this is like full human height, 

like that Sony display. 

Yes. Monitor. Yeah. It's really hard to do because you need a lot of optics in front of the display. Um, you know, I think so, you know. Thousands of optical elements in front of the display. So it's, it's quite a engineering challenge. 

And does it still only work if it's like, does it only, does it have to track a specific person?

Yeah, it tracks multiple 

people. 

Different people can see different perspectives at the same time. 

Right? So, uh, everybody has a viewing angle and that viewing angle has to line up directly with where the optical elements are gonna show you that part of that. Parallax, if you will. 

Okay. But it can work with, because the Sony one, I think it's only one person.

And if there's like kind of people hovering over it, then it like starts trying to find which person to track. 

Yeah. Yeah. And some of them are adaptive to multiple people. Some of them are really dialed in for one person. You know, Sony being Sony, they do really high-end stuff. So that's probably why 

the use case, the Sony one is intended to be like a work.

Place monitor. Yeah, like a reference monitor. This is a digital signage, so like it, you would expect this to be able to track multiple people. 'cause this would be on, in a store or on the street or something. 

For sure. And, uh, on that bezel, I'm guessing there's probably cameras and lidar systems or whatnot to kind of track who's looking at the display.

Yeah. But yeah, very cool. I mean, yeah, this is like the smallest thinnest that we've seen. Oh, what does this say? Experienced 3D effects with a one meter depth powered by signage. Oh, so does it need to have a certain. Distance behind it 

for it to work? No, the, the one meter depth is the, like, the, uh, z depth of the three dimensional space that you're looking at.

Oh, like how far the, yeah. If that model is in a 

one meter deep room white room, that's, that's what it's talking about. 

Yeah. It's just where, 'cause they're showing this measurement behind the monitor instead of like in front of the monitor. 

Oh, no, no. It, it has nothing to do with, uh, how far you are from the display.

It's the level of z depth or parallax that you're getting. See the back of that room. I see. To, I 

see. U okay. 

I get, I get what you're saying. Show. So you're mimicking a one meter deep room in like to mimic how A few inches display Yeah. 

The 3D spaces. Exactly. Got it. That makes more sense. That's 

pretty damn deep, I gotta say.

And last one, I mean, look, I, yeah, this is probably one of the bigger ones, but it was the n uh, Nvidia updates and stuff. And so the bigger one was the announcement of the Reuben platform, which is sort of the next evolution of, uh. Uh, Blackwell. 

Yep. Yeah, they've been hinting at Ruben even last year, last CES uh, I think we covered it.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, we're not like super technical, but like the kind of big. Bulk headlines was like, you know, AI compute, faster, cheaper, less energy. So 

yeah, the big takeaway Frame.io was, and I was quite shocked at how production ready their autonomous vehicle systems were. And I think it's gonna ship with the new Mercedes, uh, CLA.

So like, it's actually tied to an actual car Oh, okay. That you can buy. And, uh, I mean, look, uh, Tesla has always been, and that's gonna 

have 

like 

a what? Nvidia self-driving model in it. What, what, what's that Target have? It has a, 

it has a weird name. The architecture's called like Maram or Malam, something like that.

But it's, it's a full stack system from the hardware all the way up to the AI model. Um, everything is completely built by Nvidia. 

There also was a DLSS 4.5 update. Nice. Yeah, I was looking at like just a frame rate bump, like one eighty, a hundred eighty five frames per second to 2 47. 

Just getting more efficient than running leaner as you That's awesome.

Expect and 

video to figure out. That's cool. So yeah, that's also relevant. Anything else we missed or that you saw? 

Yeah, I mean, just a big note that, um, autonomous vehicles and sort of that world is directly sort of contributing to what we do here because, um, like all of that is making the world models better.

And run leaner and so on. And at the, as the world models get bigger, the image and video models will tend to lean into that and grab some of that sort of. World awareness, if you will. And um, I think we're gonna see in 2026, and I don't know if I predicted this or not in the last episode, like a lot of the video models, image models are gonna lean a little bit more towards world models.

They'll be better at like spatial reconstruction of places. They'll be better at populating, let's say a busy street with cars and people and so on. I mean, Nano Banana Pro does it really well. I don't know if there's direct ties to Genie at all, but we're gonna see a lot more of that. Everybody that makes a solid image model video model also has a world model, including Nvidia.

So, um, yeah, this is, it's, it's funny like all the industries and all the AI models kind of. Help each other out in a way. 

Yeah. I don't, I'm thinking back, I think we touched on predictions, like a consistent world model, like a genie. That would be, you could generate a walkthrough and be more consistent. You predicted that?

Yes. More 

like, uh, indefinitely, not like, you know, for five minutes or whatnot. 

Two minutes. Yeah. Yeah. But I think in the de noises, when we're talking about forgotten. Forgotten model. Forgotten companies. You mentioned Midjourney and then, or maybe I mentioned Midjourney. One of us did, and then we were like, oh, are, can they shift gears to be more of a multimodal model?

Because it seems like they'd have to rebuild the entire thing. Right? Because like every other company that's doing really big pushes in. Generative imaging and video. They're multimodal world models. So I think maybe that was where we were talking about that. Yes, yes. 

And we also talked about what are the two companies that kind of fell off.

And I mentioned Leonardo AI and Midjourney and Leonardo had a giant booth at CES, so they didn't really fall off. They're doing fine. We will just wait and see what they, and maybe they just 

shifted. Markets to more like, you know, just not in our realm, like more marketing or, or companies or just other, right.

Maybe they're just switching gears Industries. But, and, uh, Kling, uh, also had a booth at CES. I'm not sure exactly what they showed, but it's interesting that an AI company has a booth as well. 

Yeah. I mean, makes sense. I mean, I know, uh, you know, Todd and Fabric and stuff were doing some tosin panels there and there was some AI.

Presence in at some of the AI filmmakers on panel. So yeah, it's definitely happening there. Not a lot, nothing that I saw pop up in the new product announcement realm, but obviously AI was a hot topic in general for CES, whether it's in consumer products or m and e and, and everything else that we talk about.

Yeah, I think the real big shift for us and where we're, we're really gonna see a lot of stuff pop up is during NAB. That's obviously more MEM and E oriented, and that's where you and I first met many years ago. All, 

yep. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. I mean, also nothing outta, I remember last year at CS there was the, the Sony Akira Akira, the car driving.

Yeah, the car thing. Yeah. Thing that was kind of like, yeah. I was like, why is this here? But that was a very big, surprising. High end ME reveal. Um, so nothing like that here? 

No. Yeah. And I, I know why it's there. I mean, Sony has, um, they have carved out a floor space at CES every year, right? So they pay for it.

Why not put this thing that's on top of their list, 

just different audience? I mean, that's something I would've expected at NAB. Yeah, totally. But I think it got shipped up to like Vancouver later, so I don't even think it stuck around in LA or in the us. For what? For long. 

Yeah, I think Sony did sell a couple of those systems.

I, I see it pop up here and there. Yeah, that's cool. Or pick on, pick some on rather. 

Yeah, they should have brought that back and put those X-Wing, those LEGO X-Wing things on 'em, dude. So when you're flying the LEGO X-Wing, you got the full, you know, whatever, four degrees, three degrees think tank. Joey beating me to it.

There you go. 

Dude, big grains. This year we're gonna have a great podcast here. Thanks Joey. There we go. 

Free ideas. Tune in. You're welcome. It's only gonna cost like millions. My ideas only cost billions of dollars to execute. It's okay. 

There's a lot of VC slush money going around. 

There we go. All right, 

for everything we talked about@denopodcast.com, thanks for rejoining us in 2026.

Hang in there and we're gonna have a lot more episodes coming up around all the big trade shows. Like I mentioned, NAB will be at AI on the Lot. SIGGRAPH will cover as well as many other major shows. 

Thanks everyone. Catch you later.