How did this happen?

Let's say you're Intel.

You make laptop chips and server chips,

and they're good.

But people don't really care about

that stuff that much anymore.

So, what do you do?

Well, you hold a giant keynote,

at the biggest electronic show of the year

to tell a new story.

But, let's say a week or so before your giant crazy keynote

there's a huge, massive, security flaw

in every computer chip made in the past 20 years

that could slow your stuff down by as much as 30%.

Well, then what do you do?

If you're Intel, you do this.

- Before we start,

I wanna take a moment to thank the industry,

for coming together for another purpose.

To address the recent security research findings

reported as Meltdown and Spectre.

The best thing you can do to make sure

your data remains safe

is to apply any updates from your

operating system vendor and system manufacturer

as soon as they become available.

- [Dieter Voiceover] Well, that was awkward.

But, it was necessary.

Intel needs to be honest about Spectre and Meltdown.

But, it also wants to tell that other, new story.

And when you're at CES, the only way to tell a story

is with a gigantic, crazy light up spectacle.

Intel decided to go let me

run around backstage at a rehearsal,

to see how that spectacle gets made.

So, we did that.

Alright, so it's a couple days before

CES actually kicks off, and we're here at the Park Theater

at the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas,

going backstage to look at Intel's keynote.

They are rehearsing right now.

We're watching lots of crazy stuff happen.

With data lines flying from a piano,

to AR VR guitar players,

and we're expecting a lot more.

So let's go see what happens backstage at a CES keynote.

(suspenseful techno)

Uh (laugh) so I am on the stage.

This is surreal.

I've never given a keynote before.

Later on, we're gonna see a giant helicopter drone thing,

called the Volocopter, take off right here onstage.

There's gonna be a car, a self-driving car that comes out.

And, man, I don't even know.

Intel's really, really motivated to convince you

that they should be part of your story

of all the data in the universe.

And, they wanna also remind you, yano

their chips are good,

even though they had to slow 'em down

cause of that security thing.

They can do cool stuff.

- [Dieter Voiceover] That is the CEO of Intel,

Brian Krzanich.

We were originally going to interview him

about Intel's announcements right after this rehearsal.

But, then, Meltdown happened

and he decided that he needed to cancel the interview.

But, he did give us this photo bomb.

So I guess that's nice.

I wonder if he knew what I was talking about

when he jumped on camera.

Now Spectre is everybody's problem.

Not just Intel's.

Intel has a bigger problem.

You don't buy anything from them.

You buy it from Apple, and Amazon, and Microsoft.

And, sure, there's often Intel chips

inside that stuff

but you don't care.

And why should you?

There not right there, right in front of you.

Anyway, there's so much more

that they showed us at their stage.

So, let's get back to that.

CES is when Intel can get in front of you.

It creates this massive production,

this gigantic show, to convince you to care.

To get you to feel as connected to Intel

as you do to your phone.

That's why Intel's keynote starts with sports.

It's directly involved in the thing

that you actually care about.

Intel has these camera systems

that are pointing at football fields and with them,

it knows where the players are

like characters in a video game.

So you can see the game

from the perspective of the quarterback.

It converts everything that these cameras see

into these things called voxels.

Now, imagine a rubix cube.

Each of those cubes is a point in space.

Now, imagine a rubix cube that covers

an entire football stadium.

Then imagine you can see and track

every single one of those cubes.

Intel is doing the same thing for the Winter Olympics.

It's gonna let them create VR experiences from the games.

Intel's also getting into understanding

other kinds of spaces.

Like roads.

So it partnered with Ford to make better self-driving cars.

Alright, so now we're gonna go look

at the Ford Fusion self-driving car.

What's interesting about this car

is that it's actually part of a fleet.

They are rolling out, I don't know,

100 or something of these things,

and they actually intend to have them on the road.

They say they're level four.

Yeah, we rode in the car.

Right there, on the keynote stage.

Intel's also trying to understand

where things are in the air.

It's helping make the Volocopter possible.

Which is this gigantic helicopter drone, thing

that both companies hope will someday become

a self-driving vehicle.

Like a Jetson's car.

We got to check out the Volocopter, up close,

and see it fly during the keynote,

behind a giant glass wall.

Right there, in the room.

Ooh, look at this.

So this is the Shooting Star mini.

It is, it looks, yano, it weighs like next to nothing.

You've probably seen a lot of these,

yano, little home-drones you can get

that just fly all over creation.

But this, this is much more stable I think.

Yano, they have the little light show going.

There's obviously Intel chips in here to power it.

It seems, yeah, seems like a good little drone.

- [Dieter Voiceover] Intel has tiny new drones

that can safely fly around indoors.

Now you can't go buy one, but you can go buy 100,

and turn them into a choreographed dancing star field.

It doesn't look like much,

on the screen that you're looking at right now,

but in real life, seeing those tiny points of light

moving in a cyclone right above your head

is kind of amazing.

All of the stuff happening onstage

is just bonkers, crazy.

The floor is a giant screen.

Pillars and balls of light just

descend and ascend from the sky.

The weird, wild graphics on the screen,

they ride the line of a dystopian future hell-scape,

but they don't quite cross it.

There's acrobats wearing completely crazy

LED suits and helmets,

jumping around on trampolines.

The spectacle of it all, the sound and the fury,

The planning, and above all, all of the money.

It's all designed do convince you that Intel

isn't just a boring PC chip company.

Did it work?

Yeah.

The problem here is Intel isn't actually

trying to tell one story.

It's trying to tell half a dozen.

One of those stories is about data.

"Did you hear it's the new oil?"

Sure.

They're also telling stories about quantum computing,

and neuromorphic chips, and whatever else.

Intel is kinda famous for making product demos

that never go anywhere.

The problem is Intel wants to be everything to everybody.

Which is impossible.

So it often feels like Intel ends up being,

kinda, nothing to nobody.

This year, Intel's actually showing you stuff

that you're going to be able to experience.

Which is refreshing.

The real story here,

is that Intel can turn real objects in space,

into data, on your computer.

Other companies know about pixels on a screen,

but Intel is on a path to know about real 3D space.

But that story, it got a little lost in all the spectacle.

Then again, getting lost in the spectacle

is the oldest CES story of all.

So for much more of what's happening here, at CES 2018

go to Youtube.com/TheVerge.

Hit that subscribe button,

and prepare to soak in the strangeness

of the consumer electronics show.