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CES: Arrival

  • Artigo

As I mentioned in an earlier post I spent a week or so with my family driving to Nebraska and back for Christmas. We got back just in time for me to do a load of laundry, catch 4 hours of sleep, and then get up for a 6:00am flight to Vegas. I arrived early in the morning and thankfully got checked into my room. I had some time to kill before the rest of the crew arrived to start setting up for the keynote, hence my encoutner with Suzie P. After lunch I decided to go find the theatre and see if anyone else was around.

 

The keynote was held in the 1700-seat Hilton theatre, which is currently Barry Manilow's home stage in Vegas. There was no sign of Barry but I did see a couple of his pianos stored away backstage. When I arrived the crew was already busy unloading and setting up the equipment for the keynote. There were three main components to the demos: Windows Vista, MSN and Xbox and each had a double-stacked set of folding tables in the back for their equipment. Every demo had to be hosted on two identical machines--one main and one backup. Add in the PowerPoint machines for Silver Fox and we probably had 30 PCs and 8 Xboxs backstage, all squeezed into a room, I kid you not, only slightly larger than my office at work (and with a 7-foot ceiling). Despite the fact that the backstage area is ginormous we had only a tiny speck in which to set up since we had to play nice with the other keynote teams from Sony, Google, and so-on.

 

One we had the PCs unpacked and powered up the technical crew started the task of connecting them to the extremely complicated AV and control system. First off, all the inputs had to be remoted to the podium on stage so whomever was demoing could use the mouse, keyboard or controller to drive the machines backstage. In addition, each machine also had controls backstage to facilitate setup and rehersal and to act as a backup for the podium. Each group of 8-10 PCs were connected to a Cybex KVM box as were the on-stage controls and monitors. The video outputs were also channeled through some fancy scan converters to match the signal to that expected by the three huge 20,000-lumen LCD projectors (like this one) being used for the main screen. (If you'd like one for your home theatre they rent for about $6,000/day.) This effort required literally millions of dollars of equipment, miles of wires and dozens of technicians. It was quite a sight to behold. Unfortunately it ended up being a short day and we barely got a single source check in before we had to call it quits. Despite the fact that tomorrow was New Year's Eve we were told to come back for a couple of hours of tech prep. More on that later.

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