CEATEC 2026
(WARNING: This is a long media heavy post of my visit to CEATEC.)
This month I went to my first CEATEC, a massive tech trade show out in Chiba. I really didn't know what to expect. I wanted to go to see robots. Robot arms, robots on wheels, four legged, two legged. I just wanted to know who was building them and where the state of the art is.
The exhibitors are electronic parts supply companies big and small, but also software companies protocol organizations, research labs and trade groups. Sounds kind of boring? It is a trade show after all.
The exhibition hall is out in Chiba, the same venue as the Tokyo Game Show. The space is incredibly huge, a single floor that is tall enough for cranes to operate in, wide enough to park a commercial jet. The result is that it's very spacious even though there were a lot of attendees.
Surprisingly there are a lot of spaces for universities and research labs. It's cool that they allocate space for them to show their research projects, I'm guessing in the hopes of striking up collaboration between tech and academia.
It is surprising to see transportation companies exhibit and not have anything to sell, but to show people what kind of tech they use to do behind the scenes operations. Though not quite sure if this really deserved a Good Design Award 2026.
JR East, NEXCO (monopoly operator of expressways) were showing off different internal tech they had to do rail and road maintenance. Things that could spot potholes of a few cm using LIDAR and camera, to monitoring of train running schedules, to future turnstiles that uses UWB on a phone to let you through instead of tapping your phone or Suica card.
There was a mapping section led by Zenrin and Mapple with a few other small companies doing mapping tech solutions and also a number of indoor location systems.
Zenrin was very proud of the fact that they still use humans out in the field with clipboards or iPads to write down the color of buildings and who lives in them. It was their selling point that their maps are verified by humans.
There's a lot of data providers on offer to provide traffic flow data, terrain data, etc. Getting geo data was a popular theme across the space, people selling LIDAR devices, or SLAM or Gaussian splat based environment scanners to even indoor location systems (my PhD research topic from 20 years ago.)
I was so surprised to run into commercial UWB based indoor location systems, Ultrasound systems and Bluetooth systems on display! How things have NOT changed.
About Robots. There were not as many robots as I thought there would be. Even less so were interesting robots that were moving. I saw a total of ONE walking humanoid robot, lots of others were standing still, on four legs or on wheels.
Many robots that were switched off, or un-impressively slow.
I was quite disappointed at the number of robots I saw. I waited for 15 minutes in the crowd to see a skateboarding robot, only for it mainly do the equivalent of just keeping balance on a skateboard by imitating a human that was doing the same.
At least there was a dog offering a drone a piggy back ride.
Dentsu Lab Tokyo had the most interesting demos in my opinion, taming a quad legged robot to give you it's paw when you stretch out your hand. Awww.
The longest lines were reserved for AR glasses. There were two stands that had these long lines, Inmo which I had never heard but throughout the day there were huge lines of people waiting to try them on. And another surprising manufacturer was TDK. You know that company that makes magnetic tapes. Yeah, they had AR glasses.
Being a home automation fan, I was drawn to a huge area by the Matter Protocol. Funny that I didn't realize there was a sister protocol to matter called [Aliro] that was designed for commercial deployments, made by the CSA who maintain the Matter protocol. They showed off many manufacturers like IKEA, Google and Clavis who made matter connected devices.
I grilled the person at the Clavis stand about the Matter connected door lock they were showing off because this is the manufacturer of my front door lock. The rep there said that the thing they showed up was (a) not released, and (b) it was impossible for me to UPGRADE MY DOOR to this.
Well, I guess I'll just have to hack the door. Another one of my side quests.
Not far from the Matter stand was a pretty depressing Echonet Consortium stand that had absolutely NO hardware devices and only a bunch of pamphlets boasting how many devices the have that speak this protocol.
E-ink and old school LCD displays are my jam, and there were so many eink display makers around making things from small keychain sized display to huge a1 color eink. The huge A1 poster size display was my favorite, the colors were way better than I expected, but the refresh sequence to change the image took upwards of 10 seconds.
These manufacturers were not ones I've heard off like Waveshare or Seedstudio, they were selling to a different audience, wholesalers or system designers. 
Nearly no one showed a pricelist for any items, for eink or any other components. There was zero selling of items here.
Beside the CEATEC was the Japan Mobility Show bizweek which I learnt is the business orientated version of the Tokyo Motor Show (which also got renamed to Japan Mobility Show, confusing, I know). It wasn't very big, but they did have some prototype self-driving vehicles like buses, and trucks that you could see but not ride. This one here is a Toyota bus that I've seen being tested in Kichijoji on the streets but with a driver behind the wheel.
All in all, I'd go to CEATEC next year again, it was actually quite fun to see all this tech even though I know I am not the audience.