CES 2026 Tech That Felt Genuinely NEW

So I just got back from CES 2026 and there was some super cool stuff. I found a drone that gives you a literal 360 degree bird's eye view, AR glasses that turn any 2D game or movie into 3D, a wheelchair that drives itself like a Waymo, a laptop screen that literally grows, and a ton more. Can you fold my laundry? You think this one can fold my laundry? Can you fold my laundry? Can you do my laundry? This one can fix my spine, but probably can't fold my laundry. CES is always like getting a glimpse into future, and this year was no different. In this video, I'm breaking down the coolest tech and trends that we saw at this year's Expo. This one's going to be wild. So let's go ahead and dig right in, starting with the anti gravity A1 drone. Now, this is not just another drone like what you know from dji. This is a completely different way to fly. The Anti Gravity A1 is the world's first 8K 360 degree drone. You put on these goggles and you can look around in any direction while the drone is flying. And it's not going to change the trajectory of the drone. When you look around, it keeps going in whatever direction you're pointing it in. You actually don't need to control a camera anymore. If you've flown traditional drones, you're actually typically flying the drone around and deciding where it goes, as well as using the gimbal and pointing the camera at stuff. This one, you really just focus on flying the drone. You're inside like a 360 degree bubble that happens to be moving through the air. Now, to actually fly it, you just point this grip controller in the direction you want to go and pull the trigger. And that's it. You just point and fly. The whole idea is fly first, frame later, you Capture everything in 360, then go back and choose your shots in post production. So you're not going to miss what you're trying to get because you're literally capturing everything in 360 while you're flying the drone. The drone is also 249 grams under the 250 gram limit, meaning that you don't need to register it with the FAA to fly it. The A1 1 Best of Innovation at CES this year in the drone category. So it felt like place to start. It's also one of the few things that you can actually buy from CES right now. Now, it does go for $1,600 for the base package and gets to upwards of two grand for a package with more batteries and accessories. So it's not cheap, but I will say it was definitely fun to fly. Now, a category of product that we literally saw everywhere at CS was AR and AI Smart glasses. This had to be the product type that we saw the most out of everything. However, the glasses that really stood out to me were the new xreal S glasses. I like them so much, in fact, that I actually managed to get my own pair of these glasses while I was at the event. Personally, I'm a big Steam Deck gamer and the idea of playing on a massive virtual screen in 3D was just too good to pass up. I'm in the water though. Did you get us in the water? For some reason, I am a horrible driver. The extra one S lets you plug into your switch, your Steam deck, your phone, your laptop, pretty much anything. And you get what feels like a 500 inch screen floating right in front of you. And once it's floating, floating in front of you, you can either pin it in place so when you look around, it stays in the same spot, or you could actually have it follow you around. So the giant screen is always where you're looking. But the standout feature of this new version, well, it's this real time 3D conversion. Xreal actually developed their own chip called the X1 that takes any 2D content, any game, any video, literally anything, and converts it to 3D on the fly. So no special app, no DRM issues, it just works and converts anything to 3D. Even earlier when it was showing like the computer windows, like the windows have depth to them. So like one folder you can tell is like in front of the other folders cause there's actual depth to it. The display itself is a 1200 pixel micro OLED at 120Hz with 700 nits of brightness. They weigh just 82 grams and they look like regular Wayfarer glasses. These things go for 450 bucks right now, which is actually slightly cheaper than the previous generation of these glasses. One quick Note though, the 3D mode does cause some heating, so they get a little bit warmer, a little bit quicker, and the frame rate drops to around 30 frames per second. And in my opinion, the 3D conversion still has a little ways to go before it feels completely immersive. But as they say, this is the worst it's ever going to be. They also announced the Xreal Neo Hub, which is a 10,000 milliamp hour battery with a display port. So you can hook up a switch 2 and get 1080p at 120Hz. Pretty cool. Next up, let's talk about probably the most fun demo that I got at CES. The Strut EV1 autonomous wheelchair. Now, I personally have no need for a wheelchair, but that doesn't mean I didn't really enjoy trying this one out. The rep that I talked to described this thing to me as the waymo of wheelchairs. And honestly, I think that's a pretty accurate Description. The Strut EV1 can map out your entire environment and then you just tell it where you want to go, tap a spot on the map or say, take me to the fridge and it takes you there. And it will avoid people and obstacles and your dirty laundry or your cat. Anything that's in its way, it will go around. It uses two LiDAR units, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, and time of flight sensors for full 360 degree awareness. It's got four wheel active drive, so it can handle different terrain. And it has three different modes. You've got the manual mode where you drive it around like normal with the little joystick. There's co pilot mode where you still drive it with the little joystick, but it actually helps you avoid obstacles. And then you have fully autonomous or as I like to call it, Wall E mode, where it just does all the thinking and moving for you. The battery is lithium iron phosphate, supposedly twice the capacity of competitors. It's super quiet, it's under 65 decibels, and it breaks down into three pieces for easier transport. But I actually think what I was most impressed by was the the price. Early pre orders of this thing are actually going for 5,300 bucks, which is honestly like way cheaper than I thought tech like this would sell for. This is another one that also won the Best of Innovation award at ces. And it won a red Dot award, whatever that is. The founder is a Physics PhD from Singapore who used to be a professor, and you can tell that there's some real engineering behind this thing. It's not just hype or a toy. Moving on. We didn't really look at a lot of cool laptops this year, but there was definitely a standout that was turning a lot of heads. Now this is still a concept, but damn, it was really cool. And it's called the Lenovo Legion Pro rollable laptop. Last year at ces, we saw a laptop that expanded vertically to watch things like TikToks and reels and YouTube shorts on a larger screen. It was a cool concept, but I wasn't really sure how useful that actually was. This year they went horizontal and to me that makes a lot more sense. The Legion Pro Rollable starts as a normal 16 inch gaming laptop. But press FN plus the arrow keys and the screen physically unrolls from both sides. It expands to 21.5 inches, then all the way up to 24 inches. A full ultra wide display. They're calling the modes Focus, Tactical and Arena. The first one is a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. The second mode is a 21. 9 aspect ratio. Then there's the crazy 24. 9 ultra wide aspect ratio. The screen is a rollable OLED with a dual motor tension system that keeps the panel taut and qu while it expands. It's built on the Legion Pro 7i chassis, so like Intel Core Ultra processors and up to an RTX 5090 GPU. So it's a legit gaming laptop. Now again, one important caveat. This is still a concept. There's no price, there's no release date. But imagine packing a 16 inch laptop and pulling out a 24 inch ultra wide for gaming or video editing. That's kind of the gamer's dream. So hopefully this one ships someday. There are also few specific categories that were absolutely everywhere at CS. One of the coolest had to be the EVTOLs. I think that's how it's pronounced. There was a ton of these at ces. They're electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, flying cars basically. Some of these things look like they chop your head off with like their exposed propellers and they're very drone like. But I really, really want to fly one. My favorite was one with like dozens of small propellers that are completely enclosed, not sticking out like a drone. The big selling point of this one was redundancy. If several of them fail, you can actually keep flying, which is pretty good safety. Fe this is the Leo Jet Bike. It costs about 100 grand, but it's actually propeller free. It uses ducted electric jet propulsion. Now it can only go about 15ft off the ground and it can fly for about 10 or 15 minutes. But it looks straight out of a sci fi movie. Now if you want something that you can actually buy soon, the Richter X4 is about 40 grand. It's got eight propellers, goes 50 miles per hour, flies for about 20 minutes and you don't even need a pilot's license because it's technically considered an ultralight. This one is actually actually open for pre orders right now and they claim they'll be shipping them in Q2 of this year. So like in three months. But that's just two of the many, many flying vehicles that we saw at ces. They were everywhere this year, like way more than I've seen in previous years. Another category that we saw a ton of were these autonomous people movers. Things like Waymo and Zoox and a bunch of other companies that were all showing off their autonomous vehicles at ces. But if we're being completely real, Waymo is just so far ahead of everybody else. They've actually completed over 14 million R already. They're expanding to over 15 new markets in 2026. And their 6 gen sensor has 13 cameras, 4 LiDAR units, 6 radar units and 500 meters of 360 degree of vision. They're also going international with Tokyo and London and the company's valued at around $110 billion. And then you have Zoox, which is actually owned by Amazon and they were cruising around Vegas during CES with their steering wheel free robo taxis. They kind of look like little carriages, but the passengers inside face and passengers actually have personal screens and individual climate control. It's actually very premium now. We didn't get to test one, but this is what I've heard about them. Zoox is actually launching a paid service in Vegas in early 2026 and then San Francisco later in the year. But there's still a pretty big gap. Zoox has about 50 vehicles on the road, while Waymo has over 2,000. But these are just the big names. There were so many other like people movers. There were some designed for the golf course, some that felt like sitting at a first class airline suite, and so many others scattered around the Central hall at CES. Now I can't talk about the 2026 CES without talking about the humanoid robots. If there's anything that people will likely remember about this year's event, it's the absolute abundance of humanoid robots. I feel like this event really showed that the hardware to make humanoid robots is no longer really a bottleneck. The mechanics and the engineering of these things are kind of there, but the software and how effective these robots are right now, well, that's kind of a different story. We did get a ton of demos though. Some of them can fight, some of them could pick up objects and move them around. Some were meant to be, let's just say, companions. Hehe. Okay, here's a big smile for you. Some played piano because apparently that's something we need robots to replace for us now too. But my favorite is probably the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. They were doing demos of this robot during ces and we saw it do its like, like Exorcist style head spin. And like the way it folds its legs to collapse on itself is kind of creepy, but also kind of cool. Unitree had their G1 doing the moonwalk and actually boxing. Then there's AGI bot that claims they've shipped over 5,000 units globally already. And then you have LG's robot, which folded laundry. Like very, very slowly folded laundry, but it did fold laundry. And then you have the Zeroth Jupiter, which is a 170 pound humanoid that literally stopped working and flopped face onto a journalist from the Verge. And yes, that actually happened at CES this year. Over 40 different companies mentioned humanoid robots at CES this year, and McKenzie says it's going to be a $370 billion market by 2040. So the hype is real. But most of what I saw still felt, well, pretty early. Okay, go ahead and do your thing. Don't forget to wash your hands. There were some cool demos, but we're a ways off from robot butlers, or at least one that can. And fold my damn laundry for me at a decent speed. CES is so massive that it's practically impossible to see everything. We actually did our best to speed run the entire expo floor and find the coolest stuff. And the seven things that I just talked about were the things that really stood out. But there's a few honorable mentions that I want to quickly shout out as well. There's this company called Moises, which I saw at this like side media only event called Pepcom, and it's an AI music tool that only uses ethically obtained licensed music in their training data. Something we can't really say about most of the other AI music generation companies. I also really enjoyed playing around with this digital futuristic version of a Rubik's Cube called the wow Cube. Then there was this motor home that was actually more like a motor mansion, and Venhub, which appears to want to remove humans from behind the counter at convenience stores. We also saw the future of fire trucks and farming equipment. And finally there was a ton of robots to do various work around the house. Things like, like vacuuming and snow blowing and mowing your lawn and everything in between. So those are the things that stood out to me at CES 2026. And I'll be honest, overall I was a little less impressed than I was in previous years. There was a lot of the same stuff we saw in 2025, just like slightly better marginal improvements. Nothing that completely blew my mind this year. A lot of fun, cool gadgets, but nothing where I went, oh my God, everybody's gonna want this thing. Now. I don't know if it's just that I'm so immersed in tech that I'm harder to imp, or if the leaps from CES to CES are actually getting smaller as we refine existing tech instead of inventing whole new categories. It's probably a little bit of both, but that anti gravity drone genuinely felt new. Those xreal glasses, well, they're going in my travel bag. That strut wheelchair could change lives. And someday I really, really hope that Lenovo laptop ships. Anyway, that's what I got for you today. This video was focused on the coolest and most interesting tech we saw. I've got a follow up video coming soon with the weirdest and dumbest and most why does this need to exist tech from ces. I'd make a super goofy one just for you. You're definitely going to want to see that one as well, so make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel to ensure that it shows up for you in your feed. Thank you so much for nerding out with me about ces. I really, really appreciate you and hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye. Thank you so much for nerding out with me today. If you like videos like this, make sure to give it a thumbs up up and subscribe to this channel. I'll make sure more videos like this show up in your YouTube feed. And if you haven't already, check out FutureTools IE where I share all the coolest AI tools and all the latest AI news. And there's an awesome free newsletter. Thanks again. Really appreciate you. See you in the next one.