Our third day at the Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona was a mix of exciting and intimidating technology. We’ve already covered some of the craziest things from the previous days, but day three had a bit more oomph in it — thanks to Ameca, the humanoid robot in the Etisalat booth, that can surely hold onto a conversation, and also break out a dance move. We further checked out some more stuff from Panzer Glass, TECNO, POCO, and HTC Vive.
Ameca, the Humanoid that surprised us
The telecommunications company from the United Arab Emirates, Etisalat has brought in one of the most unbelievable things to the MWC 2024 — the humanoid, named Ameca. Built by Engineered Arts, a British company —- is by far the most intimidating, yet the most exciting thing we’ve come across. Ameca has almost real-life facial expressions and is extremely witty with its replies. Its smart conversation skills are powered by GPT-4, the most advanced large multimodal model by OpenAI.
Keeping the technical bit aside, Ameca is smart and very quick with its replies, with no delay whatsoever. While it can do a lot of things, Ameca mentions dancing is one of its favourite things to do — before proceeding to shake a leg like no one’s watching.
This was all fun to watch, but when it addressed a lady, complimented their dress, and recognised the colour and style, it sent shivers down our spine. Both its eyes are equipped with cameras, while the ears are implanted with microphones. As of now, it’s programmed to speak in English, but it knows a bit of Spanish too. With the current wave of AI devices and the improvisation in this field, it leaves us wondering if Ameca might just be roaming around in the MWC halls next year.
The Unbreakable screen protector
The area around Hall 5 and 6 at MWC was rather loud with thumping sounds from a single corner. Turns out two people are smashing their phones with hammers. Well, not only phones, but phones with a special and durable screen protector applied to them.
It’s not the first time this has been showcased at tech events, but it’s surely fun to watch one of our intrusive thoughts being fulfilled by someone. Rightfully named Panzer Glass, the Danish company claims hammers, sharp objects such as knives, and daily wear and tear do not faze their screen protectors.
We are not entirely sure what the process is behind making this screen protector as unbreakable as it is. However, Panzer Glass markets it as a diamond-strength and claims it to be the absolute strongest screen protection glass —- the short demonstration might just have proved this claim true.
Gaming on the TECNO Pocket Go is fun
TECNO announced the Pocket Go, a handheld gaming device that comes bundled with a pair of AR glasses. The demo experience was quite fun and reminded us of the Legion Go handheld with AR glasses, except with a comparatively lighter controller, and a crispier output. It claims to be 30% lighter and 50% smaller than a standard Windows gaming handheld — and the ergonomics are also fairly good.
The AR glasses, called AR Pocket Vision sport a 0.71-inch Micro-OLED display. Configured at around six metres away from your eyes, makes it seem like you are playing on a larger screen. The visuals are quite sharp and give you a wide perspective of the game. Cyberpunk 2077 on this gaming combo was quite fun, but after a few minutes the nausea kicked in, but that could be just us.
If you wear prescription glasses, a rotating slider with adjustable diopter settings of up to 600 degrees should help you. The AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS APU powers the system with eight Zen 4 cores and 16 threads. It comes with a configured TDP between 20W-30W and 16MB of L3 cache.
The POCO F5 Pro looks sleek
We spotted the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 powered POCO F5 Pro in the black and white colourway. The glass back curves at the edges, making it easier to hold in the hand. The design language does not follow the one that we have in India but instead gives a more gamery vibe. It sports a 6.67-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 3200 x 1440 pixels. The screen can also go all the way up to 1400 nits of peak brightness.
The rear camera module features a 64-megapixel primary camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide, and a 2-megapixel macro camera. The phone also gets up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage. It comes with a 5,160mAh battery and also supports 30W wireless charging. It runs on Xiaomi HyperOS. This seems like an interesting performance-focussed phone that could have made its way to India, to further increase the options for gamers in the mid-range segment.
BGMI on this should be fun
HTC Vive showcased its VR capabilities at the MWC 2024, with a fun little demo of Location-Based Entertainment for multiple users. It essentially allows for multiple VIVE Focus 3 headsets to be in a single play area for a free-roaming experience. In this demo, HTC Vive gathered about eight people and equipped them with its VR Headsets and gaming rifles for a fight against the zombies.
The Location-Based Entertainment technology allows you to determine the boundary of the area with a limit of 33 m × 30 m (1000 square meters) space. This use case was really fun to watch and had us wondering what if a group of eight friends tried their hands on this — pure chaos.
