Razer's Concepts and Vaporware

course just a joke. No such device exists, but I also mentioned how Razor, the company behind the gag, has a history of introducing product concepts at events like cees that never really seemed to go anywhere, and that convinced me to do a quick episode to talk about a few of razors vaporware products. So first, let's define a couple of terms. Vaporware refers to an announced but as

of yet unreleased product. Vaporware can cover hardware or software, and typically we reserve the word for products that are either taking longer to come to market than was expected, or ones from a company that has a reputation for failing to release stuff. And I've done lots of episodes about vaporware in the past. For years, the quintessential example of vaporware was Duke Newcombe Forever. It was a game

that was in development for fourteen years. Many gamers were convinced that the Duke Newcomb's sequel was never going to come out, and when it finally did a lot of folks wish it had not come out. Now. I never played Duke Nwcombe Forever myself. I did play Duke Nwcombe three D. The reviews I read for Duke nukembe Forever

were pretty darn harsh. Anyway, While I don't intend to put Razor on blast or anything, I thought it might be interesting to look at some of the concepts the company has shown off that have yet to materialize, and that brings us to the other term here, like concept. Sometimes the word prototype is used. Concept and prototype those are words that should not immediately lead us to use vaporware. It might be unfair for me to use that term,

because really these are ideas. They are sometimes the materialization of an idea, but it's not necessarily an idea that's meant to go into production. So I should clarify that when Razor shows off these concepts, it's doing so without the express promise that this is going to become a commercial product down the line. So I could be sitting here arguing, Hey, it stinks because this thing Razor showed off never came out, and Razor could legit say we

never said it was going to come out. This was kind of a proof of concept and we just thought it was really interesting and we shared it with the world. And that's fair because they did not promise that it

was going to be a product. One other thing to keep in mind is that some of these things may still come out as a product, or at least have some of their features worked into a product in the future, and it might be that that product is not as flashy or capable as the concept was, but it could still show that that concept served as a guideline for

certain features of products in the future. Some vaporware, like the infamous Phantom Console, never materializes, and others like Duke Nukem forever eventually clawed their way into reality and often don't measure up to expectations. So this is not me saying that the following Razor concepts will definitely never ever

come out or materialize in some meaningful way. All right, So Razor does have a history of showing off concepts at CES that, as I record this, have yet to actually become a product, and it does raise some questions like why would you show off a concept that you do not plan to bring to market? Now, there are

a few potential answers for this. Maybe the answer is that Razor is considering bringing these things to market and just hasn't pulled the trigger yet and needs to gauge interest, Or that the company may still be fine tuning the design and that the concept as it stands isn't practical for a finished product, that things need to be tweaked.

Maybe the plan is just to stand out in a very crowded field of competition at big events like CES, because these concepts always seem to garner a lot of media attention and that can be hard to come by. Like if you ever visit CES, it is such a huge show with thousands of companies exhibiting at CS that finding any way to grab attention becomes a big driver for a lot of these companies. Otherwise they're just sitting

there as countless people walk past their booth. But let's start with a concept that came out several years ago, so way back in twenty fourteen, Razor showed off a modular desktop computer concept called Project Christine. The foundation for this concept was a simple tower chassis. It had no front,

had no back, it didn't even have sides. It was just sort of a vertical rectangular stand and the corners were a little bit rounded off, so it wasn't like a sharp rectangle, but imagine a vertical rectangular stand that's empty in the middle. This served as a rack, and in this rack you could plug in modules that would serve as different computer components. One might be dedicated to RAM, for example, or the CPU, or maybe more specific things like LED controls, and you would be able to install

and uninstall these modules really easily. You just essentially plug and play hot swapping if you wanted to, so you could theoretically quickly swap out parts to upgrade your machine. Though, because these modules were being made by Razor and so was the chassis, presumably you would have to get everything from Razor to upgrade your machine. So let's say that

there's a new faster CPU on the market. If it was just available in general but not from Razor, you'd probably be stuck because you had to use this modular approach.

It's almost like plugging cassettes in in a way. Also, the concept used mineral oil as a coolant, so a module near the base of the chassis act as a reservoir for mineral oil, and then each module that would attach to the chassis also had its own little pump system to pump mineral oil through the module and thus cool it down as it operated, which was a really

neat concept. I imagine it would really appeal to people who wanted a bit more flexibility with their desktop computers, but who were not yet comfortable at building their own or swapping out their own components, because that is a big step for people. Right, you have your average consumer who just wants something that works, and they buy their computer, and then over time their computer is getting outpaced by

the complexity of software demands and you need to upgrade. Well, those folks are probably more likely to buy a new computer than they are to open up their machine and swap out components, because that's an intimidating step for someone

who's never done it before. This concept project Christine created kind of a stepping stone toward that, this modular approach where it seems much more intuitive and simple and harder to screw up, so that the average person would say, oh, I just need to pull this module out, plug this

new module in, and I'm good to go. So yeah, the concept was really intriguing, but we never got a production model of Christine, which might be for the best because if Christine the computer gained sentience and then developed romantic feelings for you, then Stephen King would have to write Christine too, this time she's a computer. The next razor concept made me say, won't you come on over? Stop making a fool out of me? Why don't you come on over Project Valerie. That's a shout out to

the late Amy Winehouse. So yes, we're going to now talk about Project Valerie. We're skipping up to twenty seventeen at this point. By the way, I got to see Project Christine and I got to see Project Valerie because this was back in the time when I was still going to CS. Well. This was during a time where we were getting a trend where companies were trying to make laptops and experiment with having multiple screens built into

that laptop. I remember seeing a few concept laptops around that time that were extra chunky, and the reason for that extra chunk was that the laptop hit a second display, typically housed inside the casing of the main display, so like you would pop it out and it would stand off to the side, so you would extend this secondary display out and then bam, you've got a laptop with two displays or two monitors. That was not good enough a Razor and Project Valerie was a gaming laptop with

three displays. Not only that each screen measured seventeen point three inches that those are big displays for a laptop, and all three had four K resolution. Deployed, the s could create a one hundred eighty degree viewing arc, giving gamers a really immersive perspective. That is, if the game supported that kind of setup, it would. Razor told booth visitors that if they wanted to learn more, they could sign up for updates. I do not think I signed up.

CS is a really busy time, but I did a little digging for this episode and I didn't find any update, So I imagine Project Valerie is fairly dormant at the moment. Now, there are dual screen laptops out there, most of them are not side by side screens. Instead, what you get as you open up your laptop, and then at the base of your primary display you have a touch display that is kind of it's above the keyboard and at

the base of the primary display. Sometimes it will even tilt up a little bit so that you have a little touch screen that you can use to do something. I honestly don't get this. I've never found one of these laptops to be useful for the way I use computers. That doesn't mean they're not useful. It just means that the way I use computers, and to be frank, I'm old and I'm setting my ways the way I use computers, it just doesn't gel with this. I've said this before

in the past too. I feel the same way about laptop computers that have a touch display built into them, where the display you're looking at is also a touchscreen. I don't ever use that, Like, I don't have a computer that currently has that, and the few times where I've worked on a laptop that has that, it's just it's the last thing in my mind. It just doesn't

work for me. So it may very well be that some of y'all out there have one of these dual display laptops where you have like that very wide but short display, I guess, and it goes across the entire with the laptop, but it's not very tall. In other words, maybe some of y'all out there have laptops like that that are incredibly useful, and that's cool. It's just one of those where I could not find a use for it. But that's more common, right. You can find dual screen

laptops like that out there. They aren't the norm, but they exist, and they are more frequent than say a side by side display laptop. There are also aftermarket products that let you mount extra displays to your laptop screen and effectively turn it into a multidisplay laptop. These typically will plug into a USB port, often a USBC port, so you can dy your own Project Valerie laptop if you so desire, though, I would definitely watch some videos online first to get an idea if it's right for you,

before you PLoP down the cash for them. One video I saw showed that if you had a laptop with a fairly large screen, it was hard to find a solution that worked properly for that. It don't work better for middle sized laptops. But I don't have one of these I haven't used it myself, so I can't really, you know, comment on it one way or the other. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about some more concepts slash vaporware

from Razor. Okay, we're back now. Project Valerie was shown off in twenty seventeen, but that wasn't the only concept that Razor had for folks visiting their booth that year at CES. They had another one called Project Arianna. Also, you'll notice, you know, Project Christine, Project Valerie, project Ariana.

Razor names its projects after traditionally female names. If Project Valerie was asking the question, hey, wouldn't it be cool if your laptop had three screens, Project Ariana asked the question, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you could turn the wall

behind your computer into a giant screen. So basically, Project Ariana was a four K projector that would connect to your computer, and you would have this projector pointed at the wall behind your computer, and the projector would display images on that wall, essentially creating a wall sized display. It couldn't magically extend your view necessarily, though it could give that impression. The projector used a fisheye lens to

create a one hundred and fifty five degree projection. It also supported depth sensing cameras, which Razor said meant that the projector would be able to detect objects that were in between the computer and the wall and thus adjust the projection so that it could compensate for any obstacle.

So if you had like a chair between you and the wall, or maybe it's another table or a little brother or something, you know, the cameras on this projector would detect that and adjust the projection so that it would be flat from your perspective, right, so you wouldn't have these weird distortions in your view due to the obstacles in place. I don't know if that actually worked or if that was just an idea, but that was what they said. So it's kind of like a very

low technology version of three D mapping. You know. That's the type of art that you see where there's a projection against a permanent structure like a building, where the animation creates these really really powerful and compelling effects on actual structures. You know, I've seen somewhere it makes it look like a building crumbles down into nothing. And then rebuilds itself as a fantasy structure. It's cool stuff. It was kind of supposed to be able to do that

at a very low end. Now. Really, Project Ariana was more about showcasing a product Razor already had called Razor Chroma. This is Raizel's technology that aims to incorporate hardware into the experiences of gaming through lighting. So think of stuff like a backlit keyboard or a gaming mouse has LED

elements worked into it. Chroma would aim to match the colors and patterns of light on these devices to accompany whatever game or movie or whatever you were running on your computer, so that the experience of that media would extend beyond the media itself. It wouldn't just be you playing this game, be your keyboard is enhancing that experience. And it's a nifty concept like one where there's this enticing idea of the game experience extending out into the

real world in some way. Virtual reality kind of takes that on the other direction, but it's the same general concept, right, incorporating us into the game experience in new way. So Ariana was really meant to show off Chroma at large scale. It just, you know, never became a product of its own. Something that did become a product, though only for a short time, was the Razor phone. Now, I'm not talking about the R A z R Razor phones, the ones

that were originally made by Motorola. They were very popular a couple of decades ago in the time before smartphones. The Razor flip phones were like a must have accessory for a lot of people of a certain generation. I was never cool enough to have one, So instead I'm talking about Razor R A Z er phones. These were

Android based smartphones that Razor produced. Starting in twenty seventeen, Razor acquired another company that was in the smartphone business and then started to use that company's technology to produce phone with Razor branding on them. Now, Razor only made two models of their phone, and the Razor three model was apparently shelved, and from what we can tell, it's

shelved permanently. But in twenty eighteen, Razor took the opportunity to create a concept that further promoted its brand new smartphone, so the Razor one was introduced in the end of twenty seventeen. Ces twenty eighteen, they come out with Project Linda. Now At a glance, Linda looked like a typical laptop computer, but it really wasn't a computer. It was a dumb terminal. It was, you know, just a place for you to

plug a phone into. Really, so the secret to Linda was that it would get its processing power and capabilities

from a razor phone. So if you were to look down at the keyboard of Project Linda, you would see that where the touchpad normally would be on a laptop computer, there was kind of an indentation, and it was a space where you could plug a razor phone into the machine and the phone would act as your touchpad, but it would also actually be the brains of the laptop, and really the laptop would just become a new interface for your phone. It was a dock. In other words,

it was a smartphone dock. And there were actually a few computer concepts from different companies around this same time that used a similar idea that you would have a smartphone doc that would allow you to tap into your phone's processing power but use it like a computer, which would be arguably better for cases of stuff like like productivity software. It's way easier to type on a laptop than on your typical smartphone, and these docks would have

their own battery. Obviously, they'd have a keyboard, and they'd have a larger screen, but otherwise they would rely on the smartphone to provide the oomph behind comput This was also around the era of ultra light laptops. This was an evolution of the teeny tiny netbooks that had come the decade before. Netbooks were extremely portable computers, but they were also a nuisance to use because they were so small, they had really cramped keyboards. It was hard to use

them and not feel uncomfortable. So ultra lights kind of followed along behind that, and you can even find a few companies that sell these sort of smartphone doc style laptops today. But Project Linda was clearly more about promoting the Razor Phone than it was about actually selling a smartphone doc itself. Now, as you no doubt have already gathered by the fact that I've included Project Linda in

this episode, it never saw the light of day. But more than that, Razor would actually abandon its smartphone production entirely. The company did release the Razor Phone two in late twenty eighteen, so you know ces happens in January of each year, so this would have been well after they had showed off Project Linda. They came out with the Razor Phone two. But then after that thing's kind of wound down when the Phone three did not emerge in

twenty nineteen. The original excuse we were given the reason for its delay was that Razor was waiting on five G network deployment, that the five G networks were slower in rolling out than Razor had anticipated, and rather than release a phone that had limited utility, they would wait

for more five G coverage. That was the excuse. I mean, I get that, but at the same time, it does seem like it's an excuse because presumably the phone had the capability of tapping into LTE networks, because I mean, even with full deployment, five G was going to have spots that it wasn't going to reach, So you could roll the phone out early and then five G capability would come online once the networks were in place. But whatever. Slash Gear actually published an article in twenty twenty two

that showed photos of a supposed Razor Phone three. It was at least a phone that had the Razor logo on the back of it. Though of course that could have been faked, and it did have differences from the previous two Razor phone models, but it didn't look that different. So in other words, it had a couple of features that set it apart, So it obviously was a different phone, but it didn't set it apart so much that it

looked truly innovative. So in that article, slash Gear ends up saying that, well, maybe the problem was that Razor determined that they were slowing down in innovation with the phones and that it just wasn't going to live up to expectations. It wasn't going to compete in the market against flagship smartphones from other companies, and so they decided to hold the plug on the whole division. They've been

pretty quiet on that front ever since. The Razor continued to support the earlier phone models, so at least people who had a Razor Phone or Razor Phone two didn't immediately find their devices unsupported. In twenty nineteen, Razor actually took a little bit of a breather with their Blue Sky concepts. They still had plenty of things to show off at ces, right, like, they brought new products in to show people, but these were things that were actually

real products or soon to become real products. So there's no fun in that, right, Like, we can't talk about all these crazy things that Razor showed off but never produced, so we're got to skip ahead. And boy, howdy did Razor go hard In twenty twenty. That was the year that the company showed off the Razor Erasing Simulator concept. No female name for this one. This thing, however, is massive and you should look up pictures or video of this, the Razor Eracing simulator. It consists of a big metal

frame that holds everything together. You got yourself a racing chair, so it's a gamer chair in the race car style that's mounted on a sturdy hydraulic platform so the platform

can create movement. The chair includes both a lap and then over the shoulder seat belt actually over both shoulders, and those were necessary not just so that you wouldn't fall out of your racing chair while you're racing, but also because they connect to motors, and the simulator would tighten the belt at times to simulate the g forces

you would feel. Let's say you're breaking really hard, well, it would tighten the seat belt so you would feel that pressure as if you were being pushed forward from the momentum you were experiencing, or you know, if you're going through a really tight turn suddenly, that's when the seat belts would create the sort of haptic FEEDBA for you.

Mounted in front of the chair is a huge curved projection screen measuring an enormous one hundred twenty eight inches and giving more than two hundred degrees field of view to the player. In between the chair and the screen, you of course have your super high end gaming steering wheel with leather covers and as sophisticated controls, including magnetic

paddles for gear shifting that kind of thing. The whole setup is meant to create as immersive and experience as possible to really capture the feeling of driving a high performance race car, and if it were an actual product, it would likely cost about as much as a race car does if Raser actually put it up for sale. As it stands, this concept may actually see some use in esports organizations, but you know, you're not likely to see this as a consumer product. It's just it would

be too prohibitively expensive. But it might be something used by professional esports organizations for things like virtual races, and there are other high end simulators from different companies out on the market that do a very similar thing. I took a look at some of them. Some of them have price tags that top out at more than one hundred thousand dollars. So yeah, if Razor is making these things for real zes for esports, then my apologies for

including this on the list. I couldn't find examples of That doesn't mean it isn't happening. It's completely plausible that it could happen. There's nothing about this design that is so futuristic as to make it impossible, but it's certainly not a consumer product. Okay, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a few more examples of Razor concepts that we're probably not going to see become actual products. We'll be right back at CES.

In twenty twenty one, Razor had a couple of different concepts on display. One was called Project Hazel, and this was a face mask with RGB lights built into it and a filtration system and some other cool bells and whistles. It was a timely concept in the wake of the COVID nineteen pandemic, but this one would eventually become a real thing. By the time it became a real thing, Razor had renamed it. They called it the Zefier, and they sold them for ninety nine bucks a pop in

late twenty twenty one. Now I should add that the zef Ear does lack a few features that Razor included in the original Hazel concept. So the ze Ear, for example, doesn't have interior microphones built into it with exterior speakers built into it, and that was meant to make it easier for other folks to understand your masked mumblings while you wore the thing right, kind of like Darth Vader, you would be able to speak through the mask and

people would be able to understand you. It also does not have a charging stand and an ultraviolet light to sanitize the mask, which was in the original concept but not in the final product. But still, Project Hazel made it further into reality than most of the concepts on this list, so we won't spend any more time on that. Instead,

we'll move on to Project Brooklyn. Brooklyn is definitely a concept rather than an actual product, so at first glance, Brooklyn looks like a high end gaming chair built on an actual like legs system as opposed to on casters, so you can't scoot around in it. It is in the race car chair form factor, but after that first glance where you just think, oh yeah, it just looks like a like a race car style gaming chair, after that first glance, the science fiction stuff starts to take over.

There's an animated diagram that shows that an arm extends up from the back of the chair. When I watch that animation, the thing that makes me think about is like someone who's wearing swords on their back and they reach back behind them and pull both swords out at the same time over their shoulders. That's kind of what

this animation makes me think about. Anyway, this arm extends up from the back of the chair to reach up over the user, so it kind of arcs up, so you've got it's almost looks like a scorpion tail sticking out. Then it splits into two arms and unrolls a sixty inch transparent OLED display in front of the user in the chair. So now you're sitting in your fancy schmancy chair and you have this curved, transparent OLED screen in

front of you. The chair hooks up to your computer or your console, and the transparent screen becomes your display. The chair includes haptic feedback, so it can send vibrations through the chair as you play, and like, you know, if you're playing a shooter game and you're getting hit, then maybe you feel like the little thuds. It of course has all the lighting elements you would expect from

Razor and their chroma technology. The concept looks like it came out of a cyberpunk film, maybe set five or ten years in the future. Like, there's nothing about it that is necessarily impossible, with the potential exception of that oh led screen concept, Because to have a transparent display like that that could roll and unroll and be resilient enough so that you could do it more than once,

that would be incredibly expensive if it were real. Now, you just look at OLED televisions right now that don't do any kind of flexing at all. Those are super expensive. Having one that was built to roll up and unroll like a window shade over and over again, I can't imagine how expensive that would be. But you don't have to worry about that, because again, it's just a concept, a cool one. There are a lot of other features

on this particular device Project Brooklyn. You can look up at Razors press release if you want to see more about it. I'm not going to spend more time because there's really little point to talk about the features in a pretend product. But in twenty twenty two, Razors said, hey, you know what we've done the whole gaming chair thing. What have we turned a gaming desk into a computer?

And that's where Project Sophia comes in. So imagine that you've got your standard flat top desk, maybe with like a glossy finish on the surface of the top of the desk, but the backside of the desk you have a port where you can plug in a display that essentially stretches from one end of the desk to the other, so you can have a sixty five inch or seventy

seven inch display truly ginormous. The surface of the desk actually has little indentation sports where you could slot in a module to create a computer that meets your specific needs, or you could even hot swap out a module with a different one and convert your killer gaming rig into a productivity machine. When that zoom call you have scheduled starts to creep up on your calendar, Project Sophia reminded

me a lot of the old Project Christine concept. Remember that's the modular desktop PC, except in this case, instead of having a vertical rectangular chassis that would serve as the basis for your modular computer, the desk itself is the chassis where you would plug modules in. But it's the same basic concept, right The desk acts as the base level computer, and the modules you slot in determine

how you've optimized that computer. And the concept is interesting, but it immediately raises questions about things like upgrading the system. Presumably you would need to depend upon Razor once again whenever you wanted to upgrade to a better CPU or GPU, because at least based upon what I saw, it didn't look like it would be particularly easy for you to take an existing module, open it up, replace a component, and then plug it back in. Instead, you would have

to get a whole new module. Again, this is a concept, so it's almost ridiculous to even talk about that, because there's no reason why you couldn't create a concept where the individual components inside the modules are also swappable like that could be part of your concept. As long as we're talking about the hypothetical. Why would we limit ourselves, right, because there's there's no restriction here. We're just sort of blue skying stuff. And again, it's just a neat idea,

but it's not an actual thing. And plus that might be you know, that might be for the best, at least for me. I can't speak for everyone. Again, I don't want to paint everyone with the same brush. But for me, I don't know where I would put my coffee cups which accumulate on my desk, or any of the other stuff that accumulates on my desk, because I would actually need all that surface area to be able

to interact with my computer. Otherwise I'd just be covering up stuff like who really needs to see that temperature gauge on my GPU? I'll just that's where I'll put my coffee cup. It's still a nifty idea. The most recent concept that Razors showed off at CES is one that I think we might actually see a version of in the future. But it's called Project Carol, and essentially

it's a high tech head cushion designed for gaming chairs. Now, what sets it apart from your standard cushion is that it's supposed to have both haptic feedback and something called near field surround sound capabilities. So if you had one of these headrests on your gaming chair rather than wearing headphones for that high fidelity gaming experience, this cushion would

create the localized sounds for you. You would have amazing spatial awareness in games that support three D sound, and that comes in awfully handy if you're playing a competitive shooter and you need to hear when someone is about to pop around a corner or when they've started to reload their gun, and it gives you an opportunity to

get the drop on them. Now, I'm familiar with surround sound in general, but I have to admit the phrase near field surround sound was new to me, so I decided to look into that to see how it worked. Because your classic surround sound works by positioning a bunch

of different speakers in specific positions around you. So typically with a surround sound system you have stuff like a center channel, a front left channel, a front right channel, back left channel, back right channel, and then a subwiffer to create really deep bass sounds. You could also have a couple of supplemental speakers that projects sound over you to really create a full envelope of sound and increase immersion.

There are different approaches around sound. They're almost all proprietary, so also that makes things really kind of frustrating for cinephiles. People who love movies, they'll go out, they'll create their audio system for their home theater, and if the movie you want supports one version but not the version you have, that gets really frustrating because you're probably not going to

get the ideal audio experience out of it. It's a whole area of tech where there's a different proprietary approaches that can become extremely frustrating. But anyway, that's how basics around sound works, right. You literally have speakers pointed at you from different positions to create this sensation of sound all around you. What the heck is near field surround sound?

And how would a headrest do it well? Near field turns out to be one of those terms you encounter in audio file circles that gets a bit whibbly wobbly, which is frequently the case with audio files. A lot of the listening experience is personal and psychological, so you can't really create these overarching, broad explanations that are universally applicable because the way you experience sound and the way I experience sound is different to what degree, I don't know.

It might be very slight, to the point where we can have a deep conversation and feel like we're talking about the exact same thing, or it could be fundamentally different, to a point where we could both be speaking the same language and still not really understand what each other is trying to get at. Now, as near as I can figure, near field references a listening experience and which you take in less of the sound of the room you are in and more of the sound of the

audio itself. So a good near field setup would minimize the sounds of the actual environment you are in, but maximize the sounds of the audio source, whether that was music or a video game or a movie or whatever. A far field experience would have more room sound, which is not always a bad thing. Think about seeing a band play at a concert venue. The acoustics of the venue, the positioning of the speakers in that venue relative to

your own physical position, the crowd. All of that affects the sound quality you experience, and that might be a wonderful thing, like it gives you a very special, a unique experience with that sound. So near and far do not necessarily mean better or worse. But how the heck

a headrest a cushion create near field surround sound? How would speakers that are behind your head, maybe a little bit to your left and your right, with the way that the headrest kind of has arms that jut out to your left and right, how would you create surround sound using that particular speaker setup. Well, that is an excellent question, and the good news for Razors it doesn't

have to explain it because this is a concept. Maybe if they did answer the question, they would use some sort of explanation relying on how sounds from the left and right speakers would interfere or boost one another in some vague way to create a rich, three dimensional soundscape

that seems to be all around you. But they don't really have to do that because ultimately, this is just a concept for a high end gaming chair headrest, so you don't really need to explain how it works because you're not actually making the thing in the first place.

Maybe you could come out with a product that has some of these features in the future, but I doubt any headrest with incorporated speakers will actually support true near field surround sound that's capable of masking the noise of the room you are in while also giving you PenPoint precise acoustic cues for the game that you're playing, or a really convincing surround sound experience for the film you're watching or whatever. To me, this feels like, wouldn't it

be cool if we could do this? Rather than oh, I know how to do that. I'm not saying it would be impossible to get at least some surround sound feeling or at least positional sound. I think you could. I just don't think it would be surround sound seven point one experience the way the marketing material does or the concept material does. It would be really neat if

we could make it. But then again, it would also be really neat if we can make a hoverboard like the kind they had and back to the future too, and we can't. This brings us up to speed with

some of razors various concepts. Again, some of these are just meant to promote other technologies that Razor is marketing with their various products, so it's really there to highlight something Razor is doing with a largely fictional piece of technology, but they have incorporated their real tech into the concept, and the end goal is to promote the real tech that underlies it. Some of them are just floating ideas that we may or may not see incorporated in future products.

And again some of them look like they're just there to try and get more eyeballs directed at Razor during CEES, which is never an easy thing to do. So no shade on Razor for doing these sorts of things. Like I said, some of these we've actually seen emerge into products. They do tend to be scaled down quite a bit from the Blue Sky concepts. But Razors not alone in this right. The entire auto industry has a history with

concept vehicles that never become production vehicles. They're just there to show off ideas and get some attention and get some excitement and buzz behind them, and then maybe we see elements of those work their way into future models down the line. But you know you're never going to be able to actually drive one of those concept cars because maybe one or two were built ever, and often it's just a chassis and nothing is inside of it.

So yeah, Razors not alone in doing this, but I thought it would cover it because I've actually seen some of these in person when I was at CS and I admit like seeing it in person. It gets you pumped.

You get excited at the idea. You think, Man, wouldn't it be cool to have a laptop that has three screens and to create one hundred and eighty degree view as I play a virtual racing game or like X wing style simulator like Rogue Squadron or something that would be really neat and it would be It's just unfortunately a concept and not reality. Okay, that's it for this episode. I hope you are all well. If you would like to reach out with suggestions for things I should cover

in future episodes of tech Stuff, please do. One way is to go on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW. The other way is to download the iHeartRadio app. It is free to download and free to use. Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can open that sucker up and in the search field you can type in tech Stuff. You should be able to go straight to the tech Stuff podcast page and

there you'll see a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length, let me know what you would like to hear in a future episode, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.