Technology

The weirdest tech we saw at CES 2025

A solar hat.

CES is a great place to check out all sorts of upcoming tech for the year, but it’s often the wildest gadgets that steal the show. The conference hosts thousands of exhibitors, all vying for attention, and you really never know what they’re gonna come up with. And this year’s show did not let us down. So without further ado, here’s the weirdest tech at CES 2025 that we encountered — all of the crazy (and crazy useful) devices we spotted out in the wild of the show floor. Just keep in mind, weird doesn’t necessarily mean bad — we actually want to buy some of these! They’re just not quite the run-of-the-mill laptop or TV from the big vendors that dominated the show floor.

A solar hat.

Engadget

Do you want to look like a professor at Hogwarts while effortlessly charging a smartphone? Then we have the hat for you. The EcoFlow Power Hat includes an embedded set of Monocrystalline Silicon solar cells and a pair of charging ports. It looks dorky, sure, but it also looks pretty dang useful. It costs $129 and is available right now.

VR can easily show us digital vistas, but can’t do much about natural movement. That’s where this bizarre, and cool, spinning chair comes in. The Roto VR Explorer moves in the direction you tilt your head and has been designed to work with Meta Quest headsets, but can integrate with other models. Surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to cause too much motion sickness. It costs $800 and is available now.

It wouldn’t be CES without an adorable robot to steal our hearts. This year’s cutie-pie is the Yukai Mirumi, and it’s an absolute unit of a fluffball. All it really does is look cute and engage in eye contact, with occasional coy glances elsewhere as it plays hard to get. But that’s enough. Playing with it feels like getting to know a new kitten, and we are totally fine with that. It should cost around $80 when it hits a crowdsourcing platform later this year.

A solar umbrella.A solar umbrella.

Anker

Solar umbrellas are such a good idea. The thing is already open, to provide some much-needed shade, so may as well make it suck up juice from the sun. That’s Anker’s thought behind the Solix Solar Beach Umbrella. It uses perovskite solar cells in its panels, which are highly efficient, and offers of up to 80W of power. We don’t have pricing or availability on this one yet, but it should arrive in time for summer.

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