CES is a mixed bag featuring real products you might want, announcements about upcoming tech you may not see for years, and vaporware that makes you wonder, “Who would want this?”
But the wacky, wild, and, at times, unrealistic are part of what makes CES, CES. With any hope, some of these developments could lead to innovative new products that consumers could benefit from. While some of the bizarre ideas feel mostly like ways for tech brands to show off, they are also ripe for ridicule.
Either way, let’s open our imaginations and check out the most outlandish displays, including concepts and real products, announced at CES 2024.
LG DukeBox
The DukeBox on the CES showfloor. You can see upward-firing speakers poking out of the top.LG Global/YOuTube
LG also demoed the prototype showing video content. In this shot, the upward-firing speakers are retracted.LG Global/YouTube
Put this one under the “experiment” column. The DukeBox speaker comes from LG Labs, which LG readily describes as a “marketing platform established to deliver experimental and innovative product and service experiences.” Currently, LG has no plans to release the DukeBox.
The DukeBox experiment is a 300 W speaker with vacuum tube amplifiers. Before you ask if it’s 2012 again, there’s more to the DukeBox. In a retro twist, the speaker’s tubular innards are proudly visible behind a 30-inch see-through OLED screen with adjustable transparency. According to LG Labs’ announcement, the concept has “front-facing speakers at the bottom and a 360-degree speaker at the top.”
When LG announced the DukeBox ahead of CES, I was skeptical about the concept, including how functional the prototype’s flashy features would be in person. But CNET looked at a working prototype and heard the speaker playing quality audio. LG also showed the transparent screen capable of showing Spotify and other music player visuals, including custom ones and video.
LG’s experiment is one of the most fun takes I’ve yet seen of speakers that look like something besides clunky hunks of plastic and metal invoking trypophobia, like Samsung’s Music Frame speaker, which also displays a printed piece of art or photo (also announced at CES 2024), and Ikea and Sonos’ Symfonisk speaker/picture frame.
See if you agree by checking out CNET’s demo of the DukeBox prototype.
C Seed N1 TV
The N1 TV as compact as it can be.C Seed
The N1 rising up, so it can start unfolding its display panels.C Seed
The Micro LED panels are starting to spread out.C Seed
The TV in its final form.C Seed
If the only thing holding you back from a 100-inch-plus TV is how much space it’ll take up when you’re not using it, then C Seed has an expensive option for you.
Announced in September and presented in-person for the first time at CES 2024, C Seed’s N1 Micro LED, 4K TV comes in 165-, 137-, and 103-inch sizes. You’d think a TV in that size class would be a proud focal point of a room, but the N1’s trick is folding like an accordion so it can bend down into its big base, taking the screen out of sight.
C Seed, which also makes an outdoor version of this TV, claims that it takes 60 seconds for the screen to come out of its box to its max height of 7.8 feet. Then, the five Micro LED panels comprising the display take up to 25 seconds to unfold “silently,” the Austrian TV brand claimed in its announcement. When closed, the TV takes up much less space but still looks like a pretty big, notably sized structure for the typical living room.
C Seed also claims to have a solution to the picture quality downgrade that you might expect from a TV being made up of five panels. C Seed’s so-called Adaptive Gap Simulation is “an automatic distance measuring and calibration system that creates totally seamless foldable TV surfaces, free from any visible gaps.”
Detailing the gap technology further, C Seed claimed that “sensors detect potential offsets between the folding TV wings, measuring fractions of millimeters and autonomously calibrating the corresponding LEDs’ specific brightness to render gaps invisible.”
Still, I expect that the visibility of the gaps, as well as the TV’s pixels (as low as 26.7 pixels per inch), will vary depending on how close you sit to the TV. With the N1 coming in massive sizes, people should view it from a good distance.
C Seed is following the trend that sees TVs camouflaging in plain sight, like Samsung’s The Frame. Differing from displaying art like The Frame does, C Seed’s technique for hiding TVs could be interesting in that it helps make massive TVs a bit more feasible for different spaces. But I’d be wary of the maintenance needs and durability of all those moving parts and about deciding if a TV this size is necessary if I want to fold it away.
The 165-inch N1 is $300,000, while the 137-incher is $200,000, and 103 inches will cost $100,000. It all sounds farfetched, but C Seed, founded in 2009, claims to have sold around 200 TVs during its lifetime and that it takes about six months for customers to receive their units. C Seed didn’t specify what types of clients it primarily has had, but with its sizing and pricing, the N1 feels most realistic for businesses.
Samsung Flex Note Extendable
Samsung Display often uses tradeshows to show off out-there concepts.Samsung Display
At CES 2024, it focused its bendy OLED on cars.Samsung Display
Samsung Display, which makes display technology for various brands, announced an OLED screen concept that can unfold as an 11-inch display or extend “by unfolding one side” to 13.8 inches. From there, you can pull more screen out from the opposite side so that you have a 17.3-inch display.
Potentially helpful for adjusting to different use cases, the display takes on different aspect ratios, depending on the amount of visible screen. At 13.8 inches, it’s 10:9, and at 17.3 inches it’s 4:3.
The Flex Note Extendable concept is a progression of the Flex Slidable that Samsung Display showed at CES 2022 and the Flex Slidable Solo and Flex Slidable Duet prototypes that it followed up with at CES 2023.
Oddly, this year’s Flex Note Extendable focuses on cars. Samsung Display specifically said that it sees the Flex Note Extendable as being able to “serve as a laptop for working in the car or as an extended display for watching movies,” adding that, when not in use, the screen “can be minimized to save space in the car.” But after Asus’ foldable portable monitor reveal at CES, I see companies being more interested in this display tech for targeting broader use cases that take the device outside of cars.
“Cars are now evolving into a mobile space beyond just a means of transportation. OLED products combined with foldable and slidable technologies will accelerate this transformation,” Samsung Display said in its announcement. Still, focusing this type of display for vehicles seems limiting. It’s possible that Samsung Display, eager to make its flexible screens catch on, is trying to force more use cases for its bendy OLED concoctions.
You can watch Samsung Display’s vision for a flexible, extendable OLED screen that’s mounted to a car slowly unfold below.
LG Signature OLED T
LG’s OLED T TV with its contrast film rolled down partially, enabling you to see what’s behind the TV’s upper area.LG전자 뉴스룸 LiVE LG/YouTube
On stage at LG’s CES press conference. You can see what’s behind the TV.LG Global / YouTube
The OLED T demoing a weather screen.LG전자 뉴스룸 LiVE LG/YouTube
Don’t want a transparent display on your speaker? How about on your ginormous TV?
At some point, TV vendors were convinced (or wanted to convince people) that expensive, big-screen TVs are an eyesore. That’s why we have designs like Samsung’s Frame and LG’s rollable OLED R TV. If you think TVs should be neither seen nor heard until you say so, you’ll be interested in the LG Signature OLED T.
This is a 77-inch TV that LG says it’s releasing this year. It looks see-through until you press a button that rolls up a black contrast film from a box behind the screen. Then, it’s supposed to look like a typical OLED TV.
Notably, though, it won’t look as good as LG’s best OLED TVs. During the show, LG admitted the screen won’t be as bright as its best OLEDs and will have picture quality that more closely aligns with the LG C4 rather than the flagship G4.
Even though the OLED T gets kudos for being the first real upcoming product with transparent display tech, it’s still a niche design. Most people would never dream of owning the OLED T. Even if they could afford the six-figure price (LG hasn’t confirmed the final cost), it’s a hard sell compared to TVs with better picture quality that cost thousands less. This means the OLED T, like other Signature LG TVs, will be limited to rich people or companies with an obsession for showing off groundbreaking tech.
Still, the OLED T represents a step forward for transparent displays, which have been a consistent presence during previous CES shows. The tech is so popular at tech shows that rival display-maker Samsung Display, for example, showed off the first transparent Micro LED at CES 2024. However, at this stage, Samsung Display was only showing off prototypes and saw its tech being next used among enterprises, not individuals.
The Associated Press got a good in-person look at the OLED T.