This is quite possibly the dumbest piece of imagination I’ve seen in many years. In a new video titled ‘LG OLED Concepts’, the display maker imagines how you may use displays around your home.
Obviously the goal here is to think up new places you need TVs so they can sell more product. I get it, I love displays, data, entertainment etc, but these concepts have to be grounded in reality to make any sense at all.
A prime example of where things have gone way off the rails with this idea from LG, is a transparent TV that lives in the end of your bed. Now on the surface, that’s not a terrible idea and products like that already exists.
LG makes a new play on the same concept by using a transparent TV instead. Here’s the problem, there’s an actual, fully fledged, perfectly normal TV on the wall behind it.
I just can’t understand why they thought this was a good idea. I’ve seen transparent displays in the past and without exception they are almost unwatchable unless they have a solid background colour behind them.
In a retail experience where you want to display lots of information, but not have a small space closed in, a transparent display makes lots of sense, but at the end of your bed, with a TV already wall-mounted behind it, apparently playing music, while you try and fire up a movie, or Instagram is just plain bonkers.
Go back to the drawing board LG, this is not the future.
The Rail TV
The next idea is a Rail & Pivot TV. This follows a similar concept of Samsung’s frame TV, that imagines we all hate TVs and want to make the dissapear when not in use. I don’t actually think that’s true, most people accept you have a TV on your wall, it provides great function and makes sense.
Assuming you do hate it, LG have imagined this new rail system that allows the TV to slide away when not in use, but given you’d need to build a new house, make your walls thicker to support it, eating valuable floorspace, I don’t expect this to take off.
They also borrow from Microsoft’s Surface Hub 2X that rotates between landscape to portait orientations. While this makes sense, it also means software developers are also developing applications in different formats and it’s unclear why content arranged in top/bottom is better than side/side.
When you’re done with your workout on the weirdest, most uncomfortable looking bike in your oversized t-shirt, there’s a nice camera at the bottom of the display, ready to take a shot of your sweaty vagina.
Subway
Making use of the available window space to double as an information surface is a great idea. That is of course until you go and ride a subway train and realise that almost every window has some teenager angst carved into it.
I’ve been on far too many trains, trying to take photos of amazing city scapes, only to have the ruined by sratched up windows, so the a display would last about a week tops before needing to be replaced. You’re also increasing the cost of each train carriage and increasing the power used, reducing the profitability of the service.
It’s a nice idea, but I fear the harsh reality is this wouldn’t work practically.
Restaurant
The Restaurant is getting a makeover too apparently with a 55″ transparent OLED and 23.1″ in-touch stretch display. This does actually look fun, allowing diners to select select from the menu, using the stretch display, which is then presented on a very large, very close 55″ display.
This seems like customers would need to take turns using the menu. In my mind, it’d make much more sense, for each customer to get their own display, somewhere in the middle of these two sizes. Even better yet, to accommodate for the issues in touching the same surfaces as others (thanks to COVID19), maybe just ordering from your phone would be easier.
Bendable TV / Gaming monitor
When I first read about this last week, I thought the idea was cool – curved display to immerse you while gaming, but then flatten out to watch a movie.
While that’s a really nice idea in theory, the practicality is that many racing sims, actually mount the display to the front of the sim, when you’re done with it, you move it out of the way (often to watch a larger TV).
There are some racing sims that feature free-standing display mounts, but again, even if you moved the wheel and pedals out of the way, you’re still looking at a 48″ TV when most displays for watching TVs and Movies are 55″ and up.
This means you will pay a premium price (early adopter tax), for a compromised experience, when the final price lands, we’ll know if it’d actually be cheaper to buy two discreet displays for each purpose, my suspicion is that it will be.
Check out the video in full below.
