CES 2025: LVCC Exhibit Halls

Article by Angie Kibiloski

Finally, we come to the last feature-length coverage of my time at CES 2025, with product highlights from the exhibit halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The South Hall was back hosting booth space again this year, after having been vacant since the pandemic, to rejoin the Central, North, and West Halls in welcoming attendees. The LVCC gives space to many categories of tech, like automotive, mobility, sustainability, gaming, home audio, televisions, accessories, and more. As with my previous CES 2025 articles, I’ll be briefly highlighting a handful of products here, and potentially posting full reviews of some of them in the future. Let’s get into it one more time.

The JVU300 is an AI-powered webcam from j5create, with built-in wireless microphone and 2k 1440p resolution. The camera utilizes both manual and auto focus settings, and the AI feature can track and maintain focus on a designated person even as they walk around the room. Easily toggle between the 4 camera modes (Track, Frame, PIP, and Vertical) using a remote instead of having to fiddle with extra software, so you only need to open Zoom, Skype, Teams, or your other compatible conferencing programs. Tracking mode is designed to track the movements of a single person on screen, Frame mode is suited for groups of people, PIP mode shares focus between a single person and an object, and Vertical mode adjusts to a 16×9 vertical frame for mobile content. The camera’s auto-exposure technology can seamlessly enhance its sensitivity to different lighting environments, so your image will never be too dark or blown out. The high-fidelity microphone provides crisp audio and noise-cancelation, and can be used via the built-in mic on the webcam body or through the detachable lavalier mic for clean audio no matter how far you are from the camera. The wireless hand-held mic also serves as a remote, to switch modes, zoom in and out, and mute the sound. The device uses a unique hinging mount so that the camera can be mounted on a monitor or stood on a desk, and easily transitioned between downward document view and face-to-face communication. The JVU300 is USB plug-and-play, so setup is super easy and straightforward. Grab yours today for $109.99.

Lark M2 is the newest lightweight, wireless microphone set from Hollyland, perfect for content creators of all types, especially those not tied to a studio environment. The disk-style mics are about the size of a quarter, and weigh just 9 grams, attachable to clothing via clip, magnet, or lanyard. Despite the small size, the Lark M2 maintains lossless, high-fidelity audio, with a 48kHz/24-bit sample rate, and up to 115dB SPL tolerance. It uses Environmental Noise Cancelation to precisely filter out noise interference across all frequencies, while maintaining the vocal clarity and tone of the user. The transmitter can reach up to 300 meters, and with a battery life of 10 hours on a single charge, and an additional 30 hours stored in the quick-charging case, it makes a great mic set for an active, on-the-go video shoot. On-mic buttons can remotely start and stop video recording or take photos from your paired device, for added ease when filming at a distance from your camera. For additional features, the LarkSound app allows you to adjust certain sound setting parameters, see your audio recording status, and smoothly receive future firmware updates to the mics. Hollyland has several similar models of mobile microphone kits, with slightly different features and designs, but I liked the Lark M2 especially for the discrete disk-shaped design. It comes in a variety of compatibility options on the store page, supporting USB-C, Lightning, Camera, and a Combo set with all adapter options starting at $139.

I feel like I’ve mentioned a lot of earbuds this year, but Ozlo Sleepbuds are worth adding to the mix. These noise-masking earbuds are designed to help even side sleepers get a sound night’s sleep, with a super small hardware module inside, surrounded by squishy silicon tips to keep them snugly nestled in your ears while feeling like they’re hardly there. The silicon tips come in 4 sizes in the box, and their malleability will help to block out intrusive sounds like snoring, road noise, or your upstairs neighbor who insists on moving furniture every morning before the sun comes up. The on-board features include biometric sensing to detect when you fall asleep, to automatically switch from your music or podcast to your preferred noise-masking sleep sounds, a customizable in-ear alarm that only you can hear, and audio storage on the earbuds for phone-free listening. Sleepbuds will last for 10 hours at a full charge, and the accompanying Smart Case can recharge them for convenient travel. In a near future update, the case will also be able to monitor noise levels, light, and even the temperature in your room, so you can track variables that may be impacting your sleep quality. I have very loud neighbors, but never want to wear earplugs out of concern that I may not hear my morning alarm, as well as ears that are physically sensitive to long periods of earbud wear. The $299 Ozlo Sleepbuds seem like a perfect solution to both my extended-wear comfort and my ability to sleep through the night without rude disruptions.

Did you know that Panasonic has an arm of their company devoted to developing hardware and software solutions for the health and wellness sector, called Panasonic Well? They partner with a variety of innovators to create products and services to care for the wellbeing of families and communities. One such solution is Umi, the AI-driven, holistic family wellness coach. Umi is a digital dashboard for the whole family to use, that teaches good health habits, boosts motivation, and encourages personal accountability. By bringing everyone’s schedules and tasks together in one place, helping families find activities they can all enjoy, and providing ways to collectively boost healthy habits and remove stress, Umi can guide a family or an extended connected community to better personal and interpersonal wellbeing. This is all done with a combination of Anthropic’s Claude AI model and a network of experts in physical, mental, and emotional health, coming together to personalize wellness routines for individual family needs. Inside the Umi platform, you can choose categories to focus on, like movement, nutrition, family, and personal time, and the AI will recommend science-backed methods and activities to improve healthy habits in each. A conversation-based AI design helps you work through the prompts and personalize suggestions instead of overwhelming you with too many choices, and will remember what you’ve chosen in the future, learning your preferences and habits. Umi will be available to consumers sometime this year, so join their email list to get access right at launch.

Another initiative that Panasonic backed this year was a competition to garner funding and support for independent wellness initiatives, and Mindless Play was one of the finalists featured at Panasonic‘s wellness booth. Mindless Play focuses on games for adults, to help maintain focus, creativity, and mental acuity as we age. Inspired in part by improv, these games will help you exercise your communication, logical reasoning, and quick-thinking skills while challenging your imagination and having a lot of fun, either alone or with friends. The games currently available to play are Filmoji, where you guess a famous film represented by emojis, Callbacks, where you have an improv-style conversation game with an AI, and Punned It, where you hold silly arguments based around puns. Other titles coming soon are Rhymoji, where you have to find emojis that rhyme within a time limit, and Speechless, where you have to present an idea using only pictures. In addition to being accessible through the Mindless Play website, businesses can license these games to integrate into their own company systems, to encourage team building and collaboration in a fun and unique way. The Mindless Play Platform designed for business integration offers a bit more than the direct-to-consumer access, like an AI-driven gaming portal that specifically targets productivity and essential skill building in a team environment. Check out Mindless Play and it’s 3 currently active titles, and pass along the link to your boss if you feel your company needs a little team building game play.

Siemens is another global brand partnering with immerging tech companies, through their Siemens Xcelerator program, to develop initiatives for societal wellbeing. One of the partner companies that was featured at their sustainability-focused booth was Wayout, a Swedish startup in water technology, producing micro-factories around the globe to convert any water source into a potable supply in a hyper localized, sustainable way. These small treatment facilities use multi-layer filtration to remove impurities, micro-plastics, and salt to produce up to 20,000 liters of clean water per day, with a naturally balanced pH and mineral composition. A micro-factory is set up near a water source, even sea water, then uses solar energy to power the factory, processing the water, and filling 10L stainless steel kegs instead of plastic. These kegs are sent to clients in the local area, along with a small cylindrical dispenser called the Wayout Tap to house the kegs, and retrieved when empty to be sanitized and refilled. The special Wayout Tap reads the keg’s ID tag when it’s inserted, unlocking the tamper-proof seal and sending water information to the cloud. This info can be tracked by the client so they can keep an eye on water usage and know when it’s time to reorder. By being extremely local, using no plastics for water storage, and having processing facilities with low energy consumption, Wayout aims to drastically reduce the plastic waste, carbon footprint, and cost of traditional water manufacturing and distribution. This is a great solution for both communities who are environmentally conscious as well as those who live far from potable water sources. In a world where clean water is getting more scarce, plastic waste is at an all-time high, and costs and carbon footprints are of rising concern, Wayout is set to provide an innovative solution to all of it. Read more about the filtration tech inside Wayout‘s micro-factories, the communities they’re serving, and plans for meeting global water needs at Wayout.com.

Mobile games come in a variety of types, and some of the more active genres would be far easier to play with a physical controller instead of touchscreen buttons. Ohsnap, the makers of the ultra-thin phone grip of the same name, have launched a new mobile game controller on Kickstarter called MCON, with an end-of-campaign shipping date of August. The MCON magnetically attaches to any smartphone with the provided MagSafe puck, and an optional adhesive adapter disk for phones without a MagSafe feature, then connects via Bluetooth for low-latency game control. When not in use, the MCON retracts flat to about the depth of a phone case housing an extra battery pack, then with the press of a button, it slides out from behind your phone, positioning your screen at the optimal angle for ergonomic play, and the slim grips fold out and lock in place. I thought the thin grips might be uncomfortable to hold, but at least for the few minutes I tested them at the show, they rested in my hands without digging into my fingers at all. The controller has precision joysticks that aren’t prone to drift, silent buttons for unobtrusive game play in public, and a 450mAh battery that recharges via USB-C in just 30 minutes to quickly get you back in the game. MCON is compatible with iOS and Android, and with any mobile game that has a native controller option. Go check out their Kickstarter and jump in now for their super early bird pricing of $99 for a limited number of backers, with increasing prices as it gets closer to launch.

There you have it, my brief highlights of some of the cool products that caught my eye while exploring the show floor of the LVCC. Take a closer look at them by following the links above, and come back for full reviews of some of them at a later date. This is the last of my main CES 2025 coverage, having previously toured the show floor of the Venetian, and given you a peek at 3 media-exclusive product showcases inaccessible to the public, CES Unveiled, Pepcom’s Digital Experience, and ShowStoppers. Take a glance at those if you missed them, and make sure to keep an eye on our site for more in-depth coverage on individual companies and products from the show.