What to expect at CES 2017

It's easy to be cynical about CES. Every year, hundreds of companies head to Las Vegas to hock their wares to the tech press, which gulps them down like so much fast food. The big companies mostly spend their time showing off untold numbers of TVs which look excellent but aren't all that different from what we saw the year before. True innovation is hard to find, buried under the piles of commodity gadgets -- but when you find it, it's worth the trouble. Take the Oculus Rift, which was first revealed off at CES 2013. Few were publicly thinking about virtual reality as a viable consumer product. We all remember the failure of Nintendo's Virtual Boy -- it may not have totally killed VR as a consumer product, but it was years before we saw VR hardware for consumers that actually felt compelling.