Discover the Most Exciting Tech at CES 2026

CES hosts several thousand exhibitors, and each and every one of them has something to show off. That’s a lot of hay to sift through in a search for shiny new needles, but I have sacrificed the health of my feet to scour the CES halls and find the most exciting products to show you. DIC Tacthancer Y’all, this one absolutely blew my mind. DIC’s Tacthancer technology amplifies your sense of touch, giving you the ability to easily feel texture that you would normally struggle to even detect. DIC had Tacthancer in both glove and finger sleeve formats for CES attendees to try, but other configurations would also be possible. And the best part? Tacthancer doesn’t require a power source. It is all passive. Don’t ask me how it works, because I genuinely couldn’t figure it out. A DIC rep told me that it involves something with metamaterials, but it just felt like magic to me. Because I enjoy machining, that was the first application that came to mind when I tried Tacthancer. Imagine you have a pile of precision parts you need to inspect for defects — parts that would be ruined by a scratch. Finding such a scratch would normally be very difficult, but Tacthancer makes it easy. You can feel even a light scratch like it is a deep gouge. This works for any kind of variation in a surface of any material, so the potential is incredible. DIC doesn’t seem to be selling Tacthancer products to the public just yet, but I’m expecting the technology to start showing up on the market in some form soon. Robbox xDrill The pitch on this one is much simpler: Robbox makes smart tools that have me considering donating my beloved Makita tools to a less fortunate friend. Robbox built their brand on the Sennses Pro, which is like a digital level, stud finder, and laser measurement tool all in one. It has all kinds of neat tricks, like the ability to use two lasers to find the center point of something in seconds. A whole suite of accessories increases the utility of Sennses Pro. But their new xDrill was the real star of the show. It isn’t cheap, with an MSRP of $1,499. That’s more than eight times what you’d pay for a good Makita drill. But that budget has allowed Robbox to pack a ton of technology into the xDrill. Through the touchscreen interface on the back of the xDrill, users can control all kinds of things. The most obvious is a level that you can set to or from any angle, but that’s just the beginning. Users can also set a precise torque limit, for example. There is even a function for controlling drilling depth, so drilling too far and into your workbench is never a concern. Sennses Pro is now available for sale on the Robbox website. The xDrill is currently available for pre-order. And I suspect that other tool brands will either license the technology or buy Robbox outright, because it is that good. xTool UV Printer xTool has really been on a roll lately, releasing all kinds of interesting new products, like the MetalFab and the Apparel Printer. But they really upped the ante at CES by going after the eufyMake E1 UV printer. The xTool team is tight-lipped with the details and I can’t yet share everything I learned, but this is a DTO (Direct-to-Object) UV printer very similar to the eufyMake E1 and the Longer ePrint. The former was the most funded Kickstarter campaign in history and the latter is still raising funds on Kickstarter. At this time, most eufyMake E1 Kickstarter backers are still waiting for their deliveries, so xTool’s timing feels very intentional. I wasn’t able to pry any pricing information from the xTool team, but they did tell me that ink would be “affordable.” It will be proprietary, like with eufyMake. However, if the ink is genuinely affordable, xTool’s UV printer could be a winner. For people already in the xTool ecosystem, the UV printer gets even more appealing. There will be software integrations that will make it easy to, for example, cut acrylic with an xTool laser and then print full-color graphics on that with the xTool UV printer. We’ll be sharing more information about the xTool UV printer as we get it and I’ll review the machine as soon as I can get my hands on it. Creality Falcon T1 If you took a peek in my garage right now, you’d find a blue diode laser, an infrared laser, a CO2 laser, and a UV laser. Those are in four different machines and they take up a significant portion of the space I have. The Creality Falcon T1 is perfect for people like me, because it is one machine that can accept four different laser modules. And those are galvanometer lasers, so it isn’t like swapping modules on a gantry laser machine. But switching from one module to another is still a quick process that only takes about 30 seconds. The available laser types are: blue diode, MOPA, fiber, and UV. Between those, you can cut and engrave just about anything. It would be nice if they somehow crammed a CO2 laser tube in there, but that wouldn’t be feasible. In addition to saving space, this should also save money. You aren’t paying for multiple enclosures, controllers, and motion systems. You just buy the Falcon T1 and whatever laser modules you need. We don’t yet have information on the price, but you can bet the Falcon T1 with all modules will be a lot cheaper than three or four separate machines. Haply MinVerse Haply’s new MinVerse haptic 3D mouse was easily my favorite product on display at CES this year. I had a general idea of what to expect before I even got to Las Vegas, but I was still amazed when I tried it for myself. MinVerse is a spatial input device intended for creative work in 3D environments, but it also has potential for other applications. For instance, it is very well suited to controlling robots. Not only can an operator use MinVerse to move a robot, but they can feel feedback from that robot’s sensors. It would even be possible for the operator to feel the weight of an object the robot picks up. The secret sauce in the MinVerse, as well as its Inverse3 and Inverse3 X big brothers, is haptic force feedback. The stylus rides on arm linkages with motors on the other ends. Those motors can create resistance to movement in any axis, so users can feel virtual bodies. That is easy enough to understand on an intellectual level, but actually feeling it for yourself is a pretty crazy experience. When sculpting in Geomagic Freeform, you’ll feel the resistance of the digital clay as you push a tool through it. Hook that tool on the other side of a protrusion and try to pull back, and MinVerse will prevent you from doing so. There are all kinds of potential use cases for this technology and I’m personally very excited about the possibilities. I can’t help but think about the robots, machines, and software I’d like to use with MinVerse. Even the gaming possibilities are enough to make a geek’s mouth water. And those should all be possible, as Haply makes the API available to developers looking to create new integrations. The Haply Inverse3 is an expensive device intended for serious professional applications, but the Haply MinVerse is much more accessible at $1,500. That isn’t cheap, of course. However, I think it is reasonable considering the tech involved and what it enables.