Pizza Hut’s ‘Black Mirror announcement,’ pole dancing robots & other weird takeaways from CES 2018

Pizza Hut’s announcement it will use autonomous vehicles to deliver pizza is the latest example of life imitating ‘Black Mirror,’ and one of many bizarre products unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Toyota unveiled the new concept, named e-Palette, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday. The vehicle will act as a mobile store, a ride-sharing car or a delivery service. Pizza Hut, Uber and Amazon are among the companies to team up with automaker.

Pizza Hut’s announcement is eerily similar to a disconcerting episode of ‘Black Mirror,’ the Netflix series set in the near future which examines our relationship with technology. What makes the series so unnerving is the realization that the distance between our current reality and the one portrayed in the series is not much of a stretch.

In the series four episode ‘Crocodile,’ a self-driving pizza delivery service named Fences Pizza hits a pedestrian with one of its self-driving trucks.

‘Black Mirror’ recognized the mirroring of its own show in Pizza Hut’s announcement, and tweeted, “We know how this goes.”

This isn’t the first time ‘Black Mirror’ has proven to have predictive powers. A season two episode where people wore Grains, contact lenses which recorded everything, was very similar to Samsung’s 2016 patents on contact lenses with a built-in camera that projects images onto the user’s eye.

Autonomous vehicles imitating television episodes weren’t the weirdest thing to be revealed at CES. That prize would go to the pole dancing robot show at Sapphire, Las Vegas. Robots ‘R2DoubleD' and 'TripleCPU' travelled to Vegas from London to perform an exotic, and creepy, robot exotic dance for the press and CES exhibitors. The flexible robots will perform from January 9-12.

TeslaSuit was another unusual concept likely to excite gamers and VR enthusiasts. The full body suit allows users to truly immerse themselves in virtual reality. Gamers can feel as though they are living in the world they play in, by feeling the heat of the imaginary dessert, or by experiencing pain from being shot.

“We see its potential future use in a variety of different sectors including manufacturing, automotive, healthcare and medical fields in particular for use in rehabilitation, biometric data set building, collection and data management.” Dimitri Mikhalchuk, CEO of Teslasuit Project explained.

LG also unveiled its latest rollable television at CES. The OLED display screen allows you to roll your television into tube form.