We recently featured 12 companies that we couldn’t wait to see at CES this January in Las Vegas. As it turns out, 12 companies wasn’t enough to satisfy our craving for new tech innovations.

After combing through the CES exhibitor list, we found 10 more companies that we can’t pass up seeing during our week long tech binge.

 

MediaTek: Stepping Out of the Budget Shadow

For years, seeing a MediaTek logo on a spec sheet meant one of two things: you were looking at a bargain-bin smartphone, or you were buying an underpowered streaming stick destined to lag the moment you opened a menu. Lately, however, the company has been quietly creeping toward the bleeding edge of silicon.

MediaTek recently flexed its serious architectural muscle by co-designing the custom 20-core CPU inside Nvidia’s powerhouse RTX Spark platform for Windows on ARM PCs. Now that MediaTek has planted its flag squarely at the forefront of the ARM revolution, we are done treating them like the budget runner-up. It is time to pay very close attention to what they bring to the showroom floor in 2027.

 

Napster: A 90s Nostalgia Trip Turned AI Fever Dream

Spotting the iconic cat-with-headphones Napster logo on the CES exhibitor list was a genuine blast from the past. Anyone who grew up in the late 90s remembers Napster as the pioneering, quasi-legal file-sharing Wild West that permanently broke the music industry over a dial-up connection.

Sadly, the modern iteration of Napster appears to have gone full zombie brand, shambling onto the show floor to peddle a “Visible AI Agent Platform” and conversational AI companions using the hollowed-out skin of our childhood memories. Putting an old logo on yet another AI slop machine is peak CES behavior, and we will absolutely be stopping by—if for no other reason than to soak in the pure, unadulterated schadenfreude.

 

Owl3D: Chasing the “Retina-Class” Glasses-Free 3D Dream

3D displays have been haunting the halls of CES for well over a decade, and glasses-free 3D has been stubbornly trying to happen for almost as long. While the tech has never caught on with mainstream buyers in a meaningful way, a handful of determined companies refuse to let the dream die.

Enter Owl3D and its flagship 14-inch companion monitor, the Shift. By promising “Retina-Class 3D” at 66 pixels per degree alongside real-time 2D-to-3D conversion, Owl3D claims to have conquered the blurry, headache-inducing sweet spots that doomed earlier screens.

We are eager to get eyes-on to see if the Shift is a legitimate display breakthrough, or just another dressed-up iteration of Nintendo 3DS-era tech we have seen countless times before.

 

Pimax: Where VR Practicality Goes Out the Window

We have had a soft spot for virtual reality ever since our very first Oculus demo back at CES 2015—and yes, realizing that was twelve years ago makes our knees ache. While the rest of the industry obsesses over making headsets slimmer and cheaper, we love that Pimax unapologetically pushes the absolute limits of VR hardware year after year.

A Pimax headset is never the most compact or elegant device in the room, often looking like you strapped an ultrawide monitor to your face. Yet they consistently blow us away with ludicrously sharp panels and massive fields of view. Sometimes, CES is at its best when a company throws price and practicality out the window just to show what is technologically possible.

 

Creality: Graduating From 3D Printing to 3D Scanning

Around the Galactigeek lab, we are already deep in the weeds with DIY fabrication, having tested our fair share of FDM workhorses, messy resin vats, and laser cutters. Now, we are ready to tackle the other half of the maker equation: 3D asset creation. Instead of spending hours modeling replacement parts from scratch in CAD, 3D scanning promises to bridge the gap between physical objects and printable files.

Creality will no doubt be showcasing its expanding scanner roster—from the pocket-friendly, near-infrared Otter to the hybrid laser-equipped Raptor and Sermoon series. We cannot wait to compare them head-to-head on the show floor to see if their compact, phone-sized scanners can genuinely go toe-to-toe with beefier desktop rigs.

 

Superheat: Turning Hot Showers Into Bitcoin

Electric water heaters are some of the most unapologetic energy hogs hiding in your garage. Naturally, somebody looked at a 50-gallon tank and asked: what if we used all that electricity to do something profitable first? That is the wild pitch behind Superheat and its H1 water heater, which ditches traditional heating elements in favor of onboard ASIC Bitcoin miners that channel their waste heat directly into your shower water.

We have been under the impression for years that home Bitcoin mining is dead and buried for everyday individuals, unless you enjoy setting your utility bill on fire. Still, the thermodynamics make a weird kind of sense, and we are more than happy to let Superheat try to prove us wrong.

 

TCL: Hardware You Can Actually Afford in 2027

Walking through the massive booths from Samsung, Sony, and LG is always a treat for the eyeballs, right up until you ask a rep for pricing and realize their flagship TV costs as much as a used Honda Civic. While the industry giants chase raw spec-sheet bragging rights that push retail prices higher every January, TCL has been silently plugging away with a much more endearing strategy: building practical, genuinely good TVs, phones, and tablets that won’t wreck your budget.

Between gawking at six-figure microLED walls we will never own, we will definitely be making a lengthy pit stop at TCL’s booth to see the hardware normal humans will actually be able to afford in 2027.

 

Waymo & Zoox: The Las Vegas Robotaxi Showdown

Yes, we are sneaking two companies into one slot here, because their stories are colliding on the exact same asphalt. Both autonomous transit heavyweights have officially secured approval to haul public passengers around Las Vegas, including pickups at Harry Reid International Airport and along the Strip.

While we will certainly swing by the Waymo and Zoox exhibits in the automotive hall at the convention center, the real hands-on review will happen when our feet give out at the end of the day. We plan on hailing driverless rides from both Waymo’s familiar autonomous SUVs and Zoox’s symmetrical, steering-wheel-free pods to see which robotaxi handles gridlocked convention traffic without losing its digital mind.

 

Amazfit: Ready for a Fitness Wearable Redemption Arc?

Over the years, we have strapped a handful of Amazfit smartwatches and fitness bands to our wrists, and we never walked away particularly thrilled. While the aggressive budget pricing was always tempting, our review units were routinely plagued by everything from sluggish, glitchy companion apps to optical heart rate sensors that seemed to be hallucinating pulse numbers out of thin air.

After enforcing a multi-year cooldown period, we are finally ready to give Amazfit another fair shake at CES 2027. We want to see if they have quietly matured into a legitimate threat to Fitbit and Samsung, or if their wearables are still destined to live in cheap knockoff territory.