DEV Community: Jigyasa Grover

CES 2026: My top 5 picks!

Jigyasa Grover — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 06:13:02 +0000

CES 2026 Highlights: AI-Driven Innovations Transforming Industries | Jigyasa Grover posted on the topic | LinkedIn

CES 2026 just wrapped up ... and I can't stop thinking about how the timeline between "impossible" →← "shipping next quarter" is just collapsing! Here are the top 5 things that caught my fancy 🤩 • the LEGO Group bricks that react to how you play with them. Chips smaller than a stud + built-in sensors. Swing a lightsaber & it hums in real-time. No app, no screen. Just intelligent physical play. • Paper batteries already in production w Logitech & Amazon. Biodegradable, non-flammable batteries + zero lithium. If this scales, we're watching a supply chain get rewritten in real time. • Robot vacuum climbing stairs. Roborock's Saros Rover deployed wheel-legs & hopped up 5 steps in 40s while vacuuming each one. The impossible will just become mundane. • Your car's windshield is about to replace the dashboard. BMW Group's full-AR HUD projects navigation exactly where you need it on the road ahead. Not on a screen. On reality. • Your bathroom mirror will diagnose you. Smart mirrors, needle-free injections & ambient health tracking that catches illness before symptoms appear. Healthcare is shifting from reactive to invisible. The pattern? Companies that treated AI as a feature to bolt on are getting lapped by companies rebuilding products, assuming AI exists from day 1. The gap isn't closing. It's accelerating ⚡️ #CES #CES2026 #TechTrends

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CES 2026 just wrapped up ... and I can't stop thinking about how the timeline between "impossible" →← "shipping next quarter" is just collapsing!

Here are the top 5 things that caught my fancy 🤩

• LEGO bricks that react to how you play with them. Chips smaller than a stud + built-in sensors. Swing a lightsaber & it hums in real-time. No app, no screen. Just intelligent physical play.

• Paper batteries already in production w Logitech & Amazon. Biodegradable, non-flammable batteries + zero lithium. If this scales, we're watching a supply chain get rewritten in real time.

• Robot vacuum climbing stairs. Roborock's Saros Rover deployed wheel-legs & hopped up 5 steps in 40s while vacuuming each one. The impossible will just become mundane.

• Your car's windshield is about to replace the dashboard. BMW Group's full-AR HUD projects navigation exactly where you need it on the road ahead. Not on a screen. On reality.

• Your bathroom mirror will diagnose you. Smart mirrors, needle-free injections & ambient health tracking that catches illness before symptoms appear. Healthcare is shifting from reactive to invisible.

The pattern? Companies that treated AI as a feature to bolt on are getting lapped by companies rebuilding products, assuming AI exists from day 1.

The gap isn't closing. It's accelerating ⚡️

The OG "VR Headset"

Jigyasa Grover — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 05:02:19 +0000

Your VR headset costs $500+ & needs a GPU. This 1850s version cost pennies & ran on human vision alone 👀

At a local history museum, I found the V1 prototype of virtual reality: The Stereoscope!

#techhistory #computervision #spatialcomputing #vr #xr | Jigyasa Grover

Your VR headset costs $500+ & needs a GPU. This 1850s version cost pennies & ran on human vision alone 👀 At a local history museum, I found the V1 prototype of virtual reality: The Stereoscope! While unboxing rare stereoscope cards (i.e., the OG "immersive content"), I realized how little has actually changed about what we're building. 1800s Tech Stack: → Display: Optics that physically separate left/right eye views → Input: Two 2D photographs taken at slightly different angles (simulating parallax) → Rendering Engine: Human Visual Cortex → Output: Depth perception with zero compute → UX: By isolating each eye's input, the device forces binocular fusion, tricking the brain into constructing a Z-axis from 2D data The business model was identical to modern VR: TELEPRESENCE! Victorian-era users could "explore the world without leaving their homes." The museum placard called it a 19th-century modern marvel. Key difference? Scalability. Today, we struggle with $500+ headsets, GPUs, and content pipelines. This tech was "affordable for most." Content cost "pennies" & "millions of cards" existed. The engineering lesson? Sometimes the constraint ISN'T the compute. It’s understanding the actual problem you’re solving. From analog optics to neural rendering, our implementation methods are evolving - but the core user need remains constant: high-fidelity immersion + accessible information. The medium changed. The problem didn't. What historical tech made you rethink your engineering assumptions? #TechHistory #ComputerVision #SpatialComputing #VR #XR

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Google's LEGO tribute 🧩

Jigyasa Grover — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:39:21 +0000

A single 2004 research paper quietly changed the internet forever

A few months ago, while soaking up the Bali sun, Google gifted me this custom LEGO tribute to “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters” by Sanjay Ghemawat and Jeff Dean.

At first glance, it introduced a deceptively simple idea: MAP & REDUCE.

But behind the scenes, Google solved some of the nastiest distributed systems problems:

Fault tolerance
Data locality
Parallel execution
Horizontal scalability

The ripple effect

MapReduce became the blueprint for Hadoop
Hadoop revolutionized big data
That foundation now powers the ML pipelines behind many AI systems today

This little LEGO set reminds me of what actually matters in AI.

It’s not just about the models - it’s about the engineering decisions that make impossible things possible:

Elegant abstractions over chaos
Separating logic from infrastructure
Designing for failure as a first-class citizen
Engineering decisions that scale from research to production

TL;DR Today’s AI stands on the shoulders of distributed systems giants. The magic isn’t always in the spotlight - it’s in the infrastructure no one talks about.