Preparing for the world's biggest tech show (photos)
A successful CES requires days of on-site preparation and laborious booth installation by all the exhibitors. These photos from the Las Vegas Convention Center will give you a sense of the enormous teamwork and planning involved in staging one of the biggest trade shows around.
A successful CES requires days of on-site preparation and laborious booth installation by all the exhibitors. Take a look at this slideshow of images from the South and Central Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center to get a sense of the enormous teamwork and planning involved in staging one of the biggest trade shows around.
Ladders abound in the South Hall as crews construct elaborate structures and precisely aim lights.
Ladders abound in the South Hall as crews construct elaborate structures and precisely aim lights.
Screens are being mounted and tested for many of the complex displays.
Apparently this is how stairs get carpeting... you learn something new every day!
If I had a nickel for every square foot of carpet that gets laid down at CES I could probably buy a pretty fancy new flatscreen TV.
Very tall cherry-pickers are needed to get the workers up high enough to do their work safely.
Companies custom-design their booths just for CES, which means hiring assemblers to carefully putting together details like this signage.
If you think figuring out multiple remote controls in your home theatre is annoying try hooking up one of these booth displays.
Las Vegas, like much of the country, has fallen on hard times in the past few years... walking around the floor seeing everybody focused on their tasks is great-- you can really sense the pride folks take in their work and most people had a happy smile for my camera.
Tools of the trade...
This must be a heavy plant...
Key rule of marketing: make sure they see your logo. Again. And again. And again.
The big booths are a bit stricter about letting people photograph before the show starts, so this is all I got before I was asked to move along. As always it'll be a big blue-lit masterpiece of a booth.
Dirty glasses?
I've never seen so many small motorized carts in my life.
Forklifts too... soooo many forklifts.
There's a lot of mess that gets made when opening up all these shipping containers full of display-stuff.
Many pieces like this platform have to be put together by a crew on site, they're too big to ship pre-fabricated.
Time to focus the team.
Each letter gets it's own lights installed and then the plexiglass goes on over it.
Someone's injecting a hint of the organic vibe into this vast sea of technology.
This is some kind of actual saw.
Once the booths are assembled and the area is cleaned of shipping debris the exhibitors will unpack and set up their products for display.
I saw a number of these bikes around both indoors and out. The spaces of the Las Vegas Convention Center are so huge that riding a bike between your booth and the parking lot would save a good amount of time.
There are huge loading areas along the sides of these halls where the forklifts can carry pallets in and out.
Outside in the vast open area between the South and Central Halls, each exhibitor has a parking spot of sorts for all their shipping containers to be stored during the week.
Items are shipped to CES from all over the world for display-- their containers are stored out back during the week and then this whole process will happen in reverse when CES exhibitors dismantle their booths and leave Las Vegas.
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