CES 2022 happened in January in a complicated form. It was technically in person in Las Vegas, but with reduced attendance, many major exhibitors pulling out, and a heavily hybrid format that acknowledged the Omicron wave. The energy on the show floor was different from previous years, and the marketing was clearly trying to reflect a particular moment in the industry.
That moment was the metaverse, or at least what companies hoped the metaverse would be. Just over two months after Facebook had renamed itself Meta and committed enormous spending to virtual reality and adjacent platforms, the rest of the industry was trying to position whatever products it had as metaverse-relevant. VR headsets that had been called VR headsets for years were now metaverse devices. Concept cars had metaverse-inspired interiors. Television sets were marketed as metaverse displays. The terminology was floating loose in ways that mostly indicated companies had not figured out what the term meant for their actual products.
What was harder to talk about, but was the more genuine theme of the show, was the chip shortage that had been disrupting product launches across the industry for over a year. Cars could not be built because the necessary semiconductors were on extended back-order. Some product categories were quietly absent from CES because nobody could promise availability. The pandemic-era stress on supply chains was still working through the system in ways that did not lend themselves to keynote announcements.
The other observable trend was AI being applied at the silicon level. Chips with dedicated machine learning accelerators were being announced for cars, cameras, drones, household appliances, and entire product categories that had not previously thought of themselves as AI products. The capability was real, even if the specific use cases that would justify the marginal cost were not always clear yet.
Looking back from a distance, CES 2022 reads as a transitional show. The metaverse pitch did not age well. The chip shortage would partially resolve over the following year. The on-device AI investments would compound into capabilities that would matter much more by the time another two years had passed. None of that was easy to see clearly during the show itself.