BMW wins the future with HoloActive Touch controls

When BMW announced last year it would bring some sort of holographic control interface to CES, I was skeptical. Today, I got to use it, and it delivers on BMW's promise and more.

The technology, called HoloActive Touch, creates what looks like a floating graphic over the console. For BMW's demonstration, these graphics typically showed binary buttons, such as on or off. Touching either button with my finger not only controlled features showing up on BMW's Inside Future concept's screen, but also sent a palpable sensation to my finger, a slight vibration that confirmed the touch.

 

AT&T, Time Warner plan to skirt FCC review of megamerger

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson (L) and Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes defend the proposed merger of their companies at a WSJD Live technology conference in October.

Photo by GLENN CHAPMAN/AFP/Getty Images

AT&T and Time Warner may have found a smoother path toward their proposed $85 billion merger: going around the Federal Communications Commission.

Qualcomm says 5G is the biggest thing since electricity

It's being compared to the arrival of electricity.

That's a big call but Qualcomm has its eyes on a 5G future. And it's not just thinking about speed.

At a CES that has given us intelligent robots, autonomous drones and wallpaper TVs, the next generation of wireless technology might not seem like that big of a deal. But Qualcomm says it will change society in ways we haven't seen since the introduction of electricity.

For anyone who thinks 5G is just an iteration after 3G and 4G, Qualcomm CEO Stephen Mollenkopf spent his keynote outlining why the next generation of mobile connectivity is about so much more than faster 4K Netflix streaming on your phone.