Reporting live from Las Vegas are Michael Calore, Julian Chokkattu, Lauren Goode, Luke Larsen, and Adrienne So.

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Lego Darth Vader lords over Las Vegas from the Sphere. The company bought ad space on the giant screen to promote its new Smart Play system.

Photograph by Michael Calore

And that's a wrap on WIRED's live coverage of CES 2026. The show continues into the weekend here in Las Vegas, but with all of the news announcements now behind us, we're going to wrap up our live coverage.

We'll still be reporting stories while we're here, and you can find those across Wired.com for the rest of the week. For now, you can scroll through down to read our live updates from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and you can always find all of our CES coverage in one place. See you next year!

Rolling Square's Await Hops on the Cheap Digital Camera Wave

The AirCard Pro Dual and AirNotch Pro Dual.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Swiss-based Rolling Square is known for its unique and smart designs of everyday gadgets, and there's plenty of that again at CES 2026. What stood out to me this year is its Bluetooth trackers. OK, sorry, I know that doesn't sound very exciting, but these look super rad.

More importantly, they support both Apple Find My and Google's Find Hub platform. The days of having to buy a tracker specific to your mobile operating system seem to be disappearing. That's great news for consumers because even if you switch between platforms, you won't have to replace your tracker. I also love that you can recharge the AirCard Pro Dual wirelessly (it lasts 12 months), though the smaller and more rugged AirNotch Pro Dual uses coin cell batteries (and lasts 20 months). They have speakers to help you find your lost items, and there's a QR code on the card, so people who find it can scan it to access your contact information. These trackers are on sale already and cost $40 each.

Also exciting is a new sister brand within Rolling Square called Await. It's still in early stages, but it's a retro digital camera that comes in a range of colors. You'll be able to snap 24 photos with three total “rolls,” but since there's no screen, you can only view your photos after the fact on your connected smartphone. The lo-fi photo trend has been surging in the past few years, with Gen-Z opting for more authentic, less curated photos that aren't digitally perfect, and Await is hopping on the bandwagon. Rolling Square expects this to cost between $70 and $100, though there's no firm release window yet.

Await.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

De-Stress With These Clip-On Vibrating Pucks

Photo courtesy of TouchPoint Solution

Stressed out? Does everything feel like a lot right now? Has CES or the news or your job or the state of the world got you feeling all sorts of things all at once? Do you think an AI-powered clip you can attach to your shirt will help? I sure hope so!

A new company called TouchPoint Solution has a new AI-powered device meant to chill you out. Thodian comes in the form of clip-on haptic tokens that are “worn on opposite sides of the body.”

It’s a device that can work on its own, but is better paired with a wearable that can track your vitals, like an Apple Watch or Fitbit or some such. If your Apple Watch detects your increased heart rate or other metric it deems constitutes a stressful situation, the Thodian tokens will send out “gentle, alternating vibrations” that the company claims will calm you down.

TouchPoint Solution

It uses a technology the company gave the very relaxing sounding name BLAST, or Bi-Lateral Alternating Stimulation Tactile. It’s supposed to really chill the user out, according to a research study produced by TouchPoint’s parent company.

This all sounds very chill and relaxing except that oh my god it costs $280?!

AI Is Finally Coming to Games. For Real This Time

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Nvidia has been trying to get game developers to use its AI models in games for years, but nearly all of the demos have ranged from unimpressive to disastrous. But the two demos the company showed off today felt like far more measured and interesting uses of the technology. The first was for an upcoming beta mode in the popular game, PUBG. In this mode of the game, each human player is paired up with an AI-powered teammate. Bots in games is nothing new, but Nvidia says that the development team has combined traditional AI techniques with three new small language models working in the background, adding automatic speech recognition, natural language processing (and text to speech), and in-game actions. In the demo, the Nvidia representative was able to give updates on strategy to the AI player and ask them to perform certain in-game actions like switch guns. The AI teammate didn’t only respond to commands—but was also proactively sharing updates on location and strategy. The beta mode will be coming in the spring of 2026 and will require at least an RTX 3060 (8GB).

The second demo was a tutorial chatbot for Total War: Pharoah, the very complicated strategy game. This is a more conservative approach to AI integration and appears to be handy for both developers and gamers. In the game, the Advisor character will be able to take the dense encyclopedia of information in the game and let players act direct questions about what to do. It can also see your screen and offer advice on how to play based on the current state of the scenario. This beta will be released over the next few months.

Photograph: Luke Larsen

Nvidia also showed off the latest version of G-Assist. This chatbot, which is part of the Nvidia Overlay, will do things like tweak settings using natural language. In this new update, G-Assist gets a reasoning mode that can change multiple settings at the same time. It can now also access the monitor or laptop settings, meaning you can now ask it to optimize your monitor's settings for gaming or even turn down the brightness. No more reaching behind the back of the monitor and clicking through the on-screen display. Nvidia even announced a partnership with Corsair that allowed G-Assist to adjust settings like the DPI of the mouse. This update to G-Assist will be launching in beta on January 13.

You Don’t Even Have to Pretend to Pay Attention in Meetings Anymore

Photograph courtesy of Vibe

Everyone's chasing vibes these days. Vibe coding, Meta's Vibes app, or just a simple vibe check. They're even being sought in the workplace.

Vibe, a company that makes smart whiteboards, announced a new robot at CES. The Vibe Bot is a nine-inch tall digital assistant meant to sit in a meeting room and listen to everything that everyone says. It costs $1,799 and will be shipping out starting in February.

The Vibe Bot looks and acts like an Amazon Alexa mixed with the doomed Jibo home robots of old. Like a great deal of other work-focused AI gadgets, it works as a notetaker. Users can ask questions, Alexa-style, about key points from the meetings.

Photograph courtesy of Vibe

“All this memory will come together in an institution memory container,” Vibe CEO Charles Yang says. “It’s more likely designing for a team collaboration instead of a siloed personal memory.”

If it works, you may soon be able to zone out in your fourth meeting of the day risk free.

Project Mirage Wants to Reinvent the Way You Work

Dune.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

The way we work on a computer hasn't really changed for decades—keyboard and mouse (or a trackpad). Apoorv Shankar wants to change that. He founded Project Mirage to modernize our workflows with new input mechanisms that augment the current experience. Shankar was formerly the vice president of hardware at Ultrahuman, the smart ring company.

At CES, Shankar's company showed off three concept devices that may end up as real products, though Shankar couldn't provide a timeline. The first is Dune, a simple three-button device that pairs with your Mac or Windows laptop via Bluetooth, and it's all about shortcuts. It's context-aware, meaning it'll learn frequent shortcuts you make on apps and websites and will suggest them for each of the three buttons. (Naturally, you can set them to do specific things too.) It's battery-powered, so you can place it anywhere. (You can also plug it into your laptop to recharge it, like in the picture above.) These shortcuts can be as simple as copying to running multi-step actions.

Shift.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Next is Shift, a nifty little device that works with iOS. If you repeatedly do a specific task every day, you can set up the Shift to automatically run it when you press the button. Say you take the same Uber ride to work, DoorDash a specific food item for lunch, or Instacart the same groceries every week—you can set up the Shift to run all of those tasks at the push of a button, kind of like the old Amazon Dash Button. It works with OpenAI's LLM to run the action, but only a handful of apps are supported at the moment.

Finally, and the most exciting, is Radiance. This is a meeting controller, so you have your standard Camera and Mic buttons to turn those peripherals on or off during meetings, not to mention a volume knob. There's a built-in microphone that should make you sound better than average laptop mics. Where it stands out is the Join button. After you connect your calendar and email to the connected app, if you tap Join within a 15-minute customizable window before your meeting, Radiance will automatically open it for you. It searches your email and calendar for upcoming meetings and video call links, even if they're not specifically set as a calendar event.

Radiance.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

There's also an AI Note function that will start transcribing the meeting to create a summary at the end, and a Voice Modulation button that uses Eleven Labs' AI technology to emulate your voice and make it sound more cheery. That way, if you wake up groggy for a 9 a.m. meeting and your voice is croaky, the Radiance can make you sound like you're ready for anything. Yeah, stick it to the man!

Again, these products are all in their early stages, and some of them may not even make the cut. But Project Mirage sure has a unique aesthetic, and it's bringing something fresh to the desk in the home office space.

RingConn's Gen 3 Has Blood Pressure Monitoring

RingConn's upcoming Gen 3 ring can now monitor your blood pressure! I've never seen a smart ring that can monitor blood pressure before. It uses the same FDA-approved blood pressure monitoring technology that's in the recently released Aktiia Hilo blood pressure monitoring band.

You do have to calibrate the BPM measurements with an initial measurement with a blood pressure cuff. Also, it monitors your blood pressure while your sleep, not while you're engaged in activities. That's actually a bonus, since taking your blood pressure while you're lying down can actually be a better indicator of your cardiac health than taking it while you're running around or sitting up.

New Ford Electric Car, New Ford Electrical Brain

Courtesy of Ford

Ford’s electric vehicle strategy has been scrambled and rescrambled in recent years. Still, it’s sticking with its previously announced plans to build, from the ground up, a whole new and more affordable electric vehicle program, starting with a four-door electric pickup that will go into production next year. Today, Ford executives announced that its new vehicles will get new brains, too. One upside is that the automaker plans to introduce a feature that allows people to drive in some places with their eyes off the road by 2028.

A module made in-house will unify operations of the vehicles’ infotainment, driver assistance, audio, and networking systems, giving the automaker five times more control over internal semiconductors. The change will “dramatically reduce complexity and boost flexibility for future features,” Paul Costa, Ford’s executive director of electronics platforms, wrote in a blog post.

Rethinking Ford vehicles’ architecture should have benefits for its automated driver assistance features, too. The Ford team says that by doing this work in-house, rather than depending on outside suppliers, it will reduce the cost of its hands-off driver assistance feature, called BlueCruise, by 30 percent.

The Prettiest Laptop of the Week

Luke Larsen

Of all the laptops I saw at CES this year, this one was the one I wanted to take home with me most. It’s called the HP OmniBook Ultra 14, and it’s powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Elite chip. On its own, it’s just a super sharp-looking laptop, with tiny bezels, a 14-inch OLED panel, and an oversized trackpad. The display claims to be able to get up to 1,000 nits in peak HDR brightness and has a 120-Hz refresh rate. It also uses an absolutely tiny 65-watt GaN power adapter, which is a boon to this laptop’s overall portability.

But more than anything, this has to be HP’s prettiest laptop in many years. The fact that it uses a Snapdragon X2 Elite chip also means that it’ll hopefully have fantastic battery life and even better performance than the first time around. HP is also offering an Intel Panther Lake version, but it says a lot for HP to support Qualcomm on this premium of a machine.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 chips were announced a few months ago, but the OmniBook Ultra 14 is among the first laptops that will actually use them. These chips are the successor to the original Snapdragon X line, which broke the long-held duopoly of Intel and AMD. They were a big deal, and a lot hangs on its second generation. These new chips promise far better CPU performance, more powerful integrated graphics, and 80 TOPS of NPU performance. The competition between Qualcomm, and Intel, and AMD has never felt tighter, and I’m curious to see how laptops like the HP OmniBook Ultra perform—and how they are priced.

The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is expected to launch sometime in early 2026.

Luke Larsen

Dexcom CEO Jake Leach Thinks CGMs Can Address the Metabolic Health Crisis

I had an interesting conversation today with Jake Leach, the newly-minted CEO of reputable CGM manufacturer Dexcom (the company makes the Dexcom Stelo). I asked if the exploding interest in blood glucose monitoring stems from the prevalence of GLP-1s, and Leach contended that it's actually the other way around: “The availability of GLP-1s is a further indication that we have a problem,” Leach said in an interview.

According to the CDC, 8.7 million U.S. adults aged 18 years or older who met laboratory criteria for diabetes were not aware of or did not report having diabetes. That's a lot of people who could use a CGM and just don't know it yet.

Leach assumed his new role on January 1. The first major change of his tenure is a newly redesigned Stelo app. It has a sleeker and more modern look than the app that I experienced when I tested the Stelo. AI-generated insights are now the first thing you see, and there are a few more minor changes, like being able to log macros with your food and get automated reminders when you forget to log.

Of course, you may not even check the Stelo app at all—Dexcom also has a partnership with the Oura ring where you can layer your glucose spikes on top of your meals and activity in the Oura app to see how exercise and rest also affect your blood sugar. As we begin to monitor more and more biometrics with more sensors (pee trackers, anyone?), it seems like one of the best and easiest ways to get more people to interpret this new data is by partnering with a preexisting fitness tracker's platform.

You Can Generate AI Art By Speaking to This Smart Art Frame

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

E Ink smart digital frames aren't new, but this one from Fraimic has a unique twist that might ruffle some feathers in the art world. Yes, like many digital frames, you can upload your own art to the display locally (no internet required), and there's also a simple mobile website you can use to add images—no app needed. Unlike many of its peers, you can also replace the frame with something else of your choosing in case you want to maintain a theme for your home. There's an accelerometer to detect if it's in portrait or landscape orientation.

But the key differentiator here is “voice-to-art creation.” Tap the bottom white space on the border, and it'll light up, indicating that the microphone is active. You can then describe what you want to see on the frame. Fraimic uses Wispr Flow's AI to convert the speech to text, then passes the work to OpenAI to create an image in an art style of your choosing. You can see the picture above—Fraimic founder Anthony Mattana says he told the frame to create a realistic image of the famous Las Vegas sign, but put a blanket over it and have the words “Welcome to Fraimic” over it, and voila.

There's been a wave of backlash against AI-generated art from artists and creators, but the Fraimic hails from a group of Chicago-based artists and designers. Mattana thinks artists will find Fraimic useful, whether to display their own art or generate fresh images.

The frame comes in two sizes: 14 x 18 ($300) and 24 x 36 ($999), and both use E Ink's Spectra 6 display for full color. The battery should last a few years, so you don't need an ugly cord, and there's a USB-C port to recharge it. Fraimic actually launched as a Kickstarter late in 2025, and those orders are expected to ship in May, and the company expects it to officially launch in June.

Nvidia's DLSS Gets a Huge Upgrade With Dynamic Upscaling

Luke Larsen

While Nvidia didn’t have new gaming hardware to show off at CES, it did preview the latest version of its DLSS platform, which is used to upscale games to improve framerates. DLSS 4.5 can now scale up to 6x multi-frame generation, meaning for each rendered frame, the system is generating six additional frames in between. Adding that many AI-generated frames causes a serious dip in quality though, so the company is also introducing a new Transformer model to remove artifacts and ghosting. They showed me a side-by-side demo compared to the previous model, and there was a significant improvement. Object permanence in the background is more stable, noise is reduced, and anti-aliasing has improved. The change in lighting was the most dramatic change though, especially in some of the dark scenes Cyberpunk 2077 I was shown. Nvidia representatives told me that using the new Transformer model in High Performance mode produces similar image quality to using the previous model in Balanced.

The most interesting change in DLSS 4.5, though, is that it’s now dynamic. The engine attempts to use the lowest amount of frame generation to get as close to your monitor’s refresh rate without going too far over. In the demo, the multi-frame generation switching could change every two seconds. While it wasn’t being shown off, I was told that Nvidia was considering giving gamers the ability to cap it at a certain level. While Multi-Frame Generation works in both RTX 40-series and 50-series graphics cards, the dynamic feature is exclusively for current-gen, RTX 50-series.

The issue of latency hasn’t changed though, which is one of the primary limitations of frame generation, especially when used in faster-paced games. However, doing more with the computer you already own is increasingly important as the tightening memory supply increases prices on new machines. The new Transformer model is available to try out now in beta, and the dynamic 6x multi-frame gen is coming in spring.

I Took a Spin in This Electric Wheelchair

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Singapore-based Strutt first showed off its EV1 “smart everyday vehicle” at the end of 2025, but it finally announced pricing at CES: The electric motorized chair will cost $7,499 (though there's a limited-time early bird price of $5,299), and it'll start shipping in the coming months. Just don't call it a wheelchair. The company is being careful with its marketing so that the EV1 is not shoehorned as an accessibility product; instead, Strutt wants it to be considered just like you would an electric scooter or ebike.

Nevertheless, I was shocked at the entire experience riding the EV1 at a very crowded event at CES. It's surprisingly comfortable, and you can control the chair normally, like any motorized wheelchair, with a joystick. However, the core feature here is the evSense system, with 360-degree sensing thanks to various cameras and sensors (including lidar) situated around the vehicle. This allows for autonomous driving; push the joystick in a direction, and the EV1 will head that way while also rolling around obstacles or people in your path. If you're riding manually and someone quickly walks in front of you, it'll brake automatically to prevent a collision.

There's a little screen above the joystick that shows you a lidar map of your surroundings—the Pathfinder feature lets you tap an area of the map, and the EV1 will navigate to it. You can even set up waypoints in your home; you can either choose them on the map or tell the EV1, “I want to go to the kitchen,” and it'll bring you there. It feels like a video game.

I only rode it on carpeted flooring, so it felt very smooth, but the obstacle avoidance was impressive. It moved around people blocking my path easily. A Strutt spokesperson told me to face them and ride fast toward them—I nervously obliged, but thankfully, the EV1 came to a graceful halt before I collided with them. It goes up to 7 miles per hour, has a 20-mile range, and has a maximum payload of 350 pounds. You can disassemble the whole thing to put it in a car, and I also like the feature where the EV1 follows you, so if you want to go for a walk to get some steps in but get tired, you can ride it back.

The Strutt EV1 feels like a great option in the accessibility space, even if it is quite pricey. I'm not sure I see it succeeding as a “smart everyday vehicle” for everyone, but maybe we're closer to Wall-E's fitless humans than I thought.

These Smart Headphones Make More Sense Than Smart Glasses

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

CES has been filled with AI wearables, but here’s a new idea: over-ear headphones. Razer brought a concept called Project Motoko, meant to replicate a lot of the same capabilities of smart glasses. These headphones have built-in cameras and microphones, one on each side, allowing the AI model to see and hear everything you do. You can take a photo or video and ask the AI to interact with it—or you can just leave the camera on and let it see everything. Razer says its solution is a more comfortable and subtle option, especially for those who don’t wear glasses. Then again, you're probably not going to talk to someone while wearing these like you would a pair of smart glasses.

But Razer also says its solution is better than glasses as the cameras are more aligned with eye level, providing a more accurate human view. That’s good for taking first-person videos, but it’s also extremely valuable for AI training. Razer intends to position this as both a consumer product and to sell to businesses for training AI models. The company reassured me that these two streams would never cross, and that consumer data retrieved from the headphones would never be sold or used for training.

In the demo, the Razer representative was able to ask the headphones a few questions about a menu in Japanese in front of us on the table. Using computer vision, we were able to hear the AI answer some questions about specific items, translated into English. It's not hard to imagine lots of other applications as well, including while cooking, exercising, and gaming.

While this was introduced as a concept project, Razer says plans to develop it into a full product that will come to market later this year.

Nimble's New Power Plays

Photograph courtesy of Nimble

We've long been fans of Nimble, the company that makes charging accessories like power packs, wireless charging pucks, and very nice cables. At CES 2026, Nimble showed up with its latest line of power accessories, and two things stood out.

First is the new Champ Stack 10K, a 10,000-mAh power bank that splits in half to give you two independent 5,000-mAh chargers. Clever! When the two halves are snapped together, the Champ offers 30-watt charging. When you break it apart, each half can put out 20 watts of charging power. It's a great design for couples to share a power pack on a long trip or at a music festival. There's no price yet, but I want one anyway.

Photograph courtesy of Nimble

Second is Nimble's new collaboration with the battery tech company Flint. It's a range of travel Find-My-compatible accessories that have paper batteries inside. Yes, paper: Flint's tech uses a cellulose chemistry that's biodegradable, rechargeable, and very slim. The line of accessories includes a passport wallet, a slim wallet, a key chain, and a luggage tag. All of them are wrapped in Nimble's colorful vegan leather, and you'd never know there's a wirelessly chargeable battery inside because the cell in just 1 millimeter thick.

Now I'm all in on paper batteries. Can't wait to try these out.

Rideable Luggage Doesn't Make Any Sense

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

There's a growing EV-fication happening at CES 2026. Anything you've had to manually push or pull before probably has an electric version today, from Navee's electric golf carts to Gyroor's Rideable Luggage. We've seen the latter before, but they seem to be growing popular every year (I even saw someone riding a different luggage in one of the halls at CES!). You can pull out the stem of this mini carry-on from Gyroor, along with the handlebars, and you can ride as fast as 6 miles per hour. (It has a max load of around 240 pounds.)

But there are far too many flaws for this category of product. First, your carry-on is heavier and smaller to accommodate the scooter components and still fit in overhead cabins. More importantly, many airports and airlines have started banning rideable luggage, even if the battery is removable, like the one here. While you may get away with it going to your destination, there's a chance you'll have to leave this piece of kit behind on the way back. It's cute and fun, but hardly worth the risk.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Yeah, I Do Want an AI-Enabled Skateboard Penguin

You know what? This is what CES is all about. I am in Eureka Park, the best and most fun part of CES, with all the startups and student creators and people who are genuinely very stoked to be here. The nicest man just gave me the best swag I've ever gotten in years of going to this show.

You know what? Yeah, I do want a little automated skateboard penguin. Beijing-based WalkArrive says that my little skateboard friend will hear me talk, “possess self-awareness” and the ability to learn, and follow me around everywhere with SLAM-based navigation. Is this penguin maybe just a stuffed animal glued on top of a robot vacuum? Sure! Who cares! I love him. His name is Sandy.

Neurable's Headset Analyzes Gamers’ Brain Waves

Photograph courtesy HyperX / Neurable

Neurable makes headsets that, it claims, can read your brain waves while you wear them. Think of it as an activity tracker that would monitor your heart rate, but instead tracks your mental habits with the goal of enhancing focus and productivity. Neurable’s upcoming headpiece, a partnership with the gaming hardware brand HyperX, is focused on fixing gamers’ skill issues.

The headset is equipped with what Neurable calls “non-invasive sensors and real-time signal interpretation, brain-computer interface” tech. The setup is meant to track info about player’s attention and focus, then offer ways to use that data to better lock in for high intensity matches. Ultimately, it seems it will be marketed especially toward competitive gamers, though the company’s ambitions for its (for now) non-invasive brain computer tech goes far beyond gaming, as it has called its efforts to get into gaming tech the, “front door of BCI.”

Later at CES, Neurable announced a partnership with Qualcomm where people could test out using the headsets to pilot a simulated rocket ship with their brain. (Presumably you just concentrate really hard while thinking, “UP! UP!!”)

The Neurable HyperX headset isn’t quite a real product yet. It is still in the prototype phase, and will take time to test out how to best optimize your K/D ratio.