Dinosaurs, robot ping pong, and the things we saw at CEATEC 2014

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I always feel a little sorry for CEATEC. "Japan's biggest consumer electronics show" sounds like it should be a big deal, but the country's biggest hitters like Sony and Sharp tend to make their biggest announcements elsewhere, and shows like Photokina, CP+, and Tokyo Game Show attract most of the attention for the industries Japan still thrives in.

Still, that's not to say that there isn't enough to make it worth the commute to Chiba each year, just a couple of weeks after Tokyo Game Show is held in the same cavernous Makuhari Messe complex. This year's CEATEC may not have turned up much news, but it did involve creepy androids, inexplicable dinosaurs (see above), and a strange fixation on the production of vegetables.

Grid View This nightmarish "communication android" named Aiko Chihira welcomes visitors to the Toshiba booth.

Toshiba Glass is exactly what it sounds like: the Japanese company's take on Google Glass. It's more or less a similar experience, but the display appears a little more directly in your field of vision. Toshiba envisages it helping with short-term weather alerts, fitness tracking, cookery, and more.

Toshiba Glass was shown off with a variety of frames. All looked more discreet than the regular Google Glass design, but there's a pretty conspicuous bulge on the side that hosts the internal hardware.

Toshiba is also at the forefront of one of the oddest trends in Japanese tech — corporations turning to vegetable farming. Toshiba has repurposed an old floppy disk factory in Yokosuka to produce the produce.

Toshiba will use the crops in its company cafeteria at first, but also wants to sell salads to convenience stores and supermarkets.

Fujitsu has also got in on the high-tech vegetable boom. This theatrical production aims to explain the benefits of combining IT and agriculture.

MARIO (Mid-Air Augmented Reality Interaction with Objects) is a system devised by Tokyo University researches. It uses Kinect, a display, and optics to create the illusion that a character is floating in space over the blocks. Raise or stack the blocks, and the cute chicken character will move in time — it's like Super Mario Bros. in real life.

This robot exoskeleton by a company called Skeletronics was unfortunately (or thankfully) non-functional on the show floor.

While it doesn't make for the most exciting trade show demo, leading Japanese carrier NTT Docomo is heavily pushing its investment into developing 5G technologies. It's working with companies including Samsung, Nokia, and Fujitsu to conduct trials, and expects to commercialize a network with download speeds of over 10Gbps by 2020.

I do not know why the centerpiece of Honda's booth is an abstracted Formula 1 car beneath two giant tablet-carrying back-to-back babies.

CEATEC 2014 could be one of the last chances to see Pioneer's range of DJ equipment in action before the company spins the division off to a private equity firm

Nevertheless, the company is showing off a motion-controlled concept for the future of DJing that works a little like a theremin.

This ping-pong robot from Omron is pretty good at maintaining simple rallies, but doesn't look too difficult to beat. The robots aren't taking over just yet.



