CES 2018: The Most Ridiculous VR and AR Headsets We Tried at CES

(upbeat dance music)

(laughing)

I'm flying on a dinosaur somehow.

This, in Samsung's booth, is probably the most intense

VR thing you can possibly do.

Whoa.

There's a lot going on at CES 2018,

but there might not be a trend bigger than

virtual reality and augmented reality.

There are headsets everywhere.

So we decided we're gonna run around,

try on a bunch of 'em, and see where we are

in this crazy world of VR and AR.

This is the Vuzix Blade.

It's kind of what Google Glass was always supposed to be.

They're AR glasses.

They're mostly designed for the workplace,

but they basically, they put a screen right here

in front of my face, and I can do things like

check notifications.

I can get information.

The newest version has Alexa.

So you can just tap and talk to Alexa.

I'm watching a video right now while I'm talking to you,

and it's extremely distracting.

And it's basically, otherwise,

it's just a normal-looking pair of glasses.

This is a lot more normal than Google Glass.

And this is about the best augmented reality I've ever seen.

This one is the Merge Mini.

It's designed to be used by kids.

It's super durable; you can beat it up and throw it around,

and it'll be fine.

It's gonna be super cheap, super easy.

It's a cardboard viewer and works with a bunch of apps.

One of the weird logistical things about CES

is that they have these VR headsets,

and there's 100,000 people here,

all of whom want to wear those VR headsets,

and that's disgusting.

So to solve that, they've made these things.

They're like gloves you would wear before you go

into an emergency room or something.

And as best I can tell, they make me look very cool.

This is the Pico Goblin.

It's more of a sort of mid-range,

kind of standalone headset.

It's the headset and this.

And I have three degrees of freedom,

so I can move around a little,

but not as much as you might in some higher end stuff.

So, here we go.

I'm in a hot air balloon,

and as a person who doesn't love heights,

this was a terrifying thing to suddenly have

happen to me.

We're still in the really early days of both VR and AR.

But there were some big upgrades this year.

There were headsets everywhere here,

that don't need a phone, and they don't need a computer.

They're these stand alone things that you can just put on.

Making these things easier to use is gonna be huge

in making them more popular.

But in general we're still trying to figure out

how all of this is gonna work.

We saw headsets that are many hundreds of dollars.

We saw headsets that were a few dollars.

We are at the beginning

of what all of this is going to be.

VR and AR are going to be big.

Everybody agrees on that.

But what these things are gonna be, nobody knows.

Everybody here has different ideas

about how you're gonna use it, what you're gonna want,

what it should look like on your face,

how much it should cost.

And it's gonna take a while for all of that

to get sorted out.

That was insane.

(laughing)