CES is happening this week, sort of. Third day of it as I'm typing this, all crammed into a browser tab instead of a convention center in Vegas, and honestly the whole thing has the energy of watching someone else's Zoom meeting. No show floor, no free tote bags, no guy demoing a smart toilet three feet from a guy demoing a folding TV. Just a parade of pre-recorded press conferences dropping into YouTube at scheduled times like it's 2007 and we're all waiting for a movie trailer.
Most of it I scrolled past. Another 8K TV. Another laptop that's 4mm thinner than last year's. But Razer's press event actually made me sit up, because they showed off something called Project Hazel, and it's a face mask. An actual N95-grade mask, with a clear panel so people can see your mouth move (because apparently we forgot how much of talking to someone is watching their face), a built-in microphone and amplifier so you don't sound like you're yelling through a pillow, a UV-C sterilizing charging case, and, this is the part that got me, RGB lighting built into the edges. Chroma lighting. On a mask you wear over your face during a pandemic.
I've used Razer keyboards for over a decade and I own the argument that the lighting on those things is pointless and I buy them anyway, so I get it, RGB is basically Razer's whole brand identity at this point. But putting it on a medical-adjacent mask is a genuinely bizarre choice that somehow also feels like the most correct possible summary of where we are right now. We're ten months into this thing. We're still googling "how long does covid live on surfaces" and stress-refreshing news sites, and the gadget response to all that is: what if the mask also looked cool on camera. It's a prototype, not something you'll buy this year probably, and I don't think it ships looking anything like the demo. Doesn't matter. It's already the image I'll remember from this CES.
Everything else this week has felt like set dressing around it. GM did a keynote and rolled out a new logo (lowercase now, with a subtle plug shape worked into the M, very on brand for a company that's spent the last two years insisting it's actually an EV company) and announced this delivery-van offshoot called BrightDrop, which is aimed squarely at FedEx and UPS and the whole last-mile delivery mess that 2020 made everyone suddenly obsessed with. LG put out a short teaser clip of a phone that rolls its screen out sideways, no pricing, no real specs, just a fifteen-second video meant to get people talking. It worked, I guess, I'm talking about it. But a fifteen-second teaser is not a product and I wish outlets would stop covering vaporware like it's a launch.
None of this is really news you need me to explain, it's all over every tech site this week with much better production values than I have here. What I keep coming back to is how strange it is to experience a trade show through a laptop at my kitchen table, coffee going cold, instead of getting shoved around a convention hall by fifty thousand other people. Last year's CES I was actually there for about six hours before I gave up and went back to the hotel with a headache and a bag full of USB cables I didn't need. I complained about it constantly at the time. Now I'm sort of missing the headache.
Anyway. If you want my actual take: the mask is the story. Not because it's going to be a real product anyone wears to the grocery store, but because a company known for gaming peripherals looked at "wear this to not die" and decided the answer was also "make it glow." That's 2021 in one object, thirteen days in.