RERUN: The CES Products That Never Made It

on January one, so not quite two years old. Now. It's called the c e S Products That Never Made It. I decided to rerun this one because this week is when c e S Tree is taking place. I am, of course I'm not there, my old be covering it from the comforts of my home office, which honestly is pretty nice. I do miss seeing all my colleagues at c e S. That was always the highlight for me. I mean, it was great seeing tech in person and occasionally getting hands on experience with it. That was awesome.

I'm not I don't wish to dismiss that is a really incredible experience, but it's the people who really made it truly special. So I will miss that, and I've got friends out there. Hi, Shannon, hope you're having a great time out there, but yeah, I'm gonna be home anyway. One of the things about C E S that typically gets a little frustrating over time is that not everything you'll see when you're at the show will ever actually make it to market. Sometimes it's because the thing you're

looking as a prototype. Sometimes it's because the company that was going to introduce it doesn't exist anymore later on in the year. So I thought you would enjoy this episode from January one the C E S products that never made it. Now, sometimes we see a product that isn't bad, it's just ahead of its time. The implementation of the technology might be a little on the crude side, and the price tag might be a lot on the high side, and so an idea, while a good one,

might not go very far. That might be why the robot called Genus never really had a chance. Genus that's g E n U S debuted at c S N. The robot looks a little bit like a pedestal on wheels, kind of similar to some of the robots that Samsung showed off at the c E S T one like uh, like the the bot Handy robot. However, the Genus robot is a little more angular. It's not quite so smooth and round as the other robots are. It's also quintessentially eighties in style, so I recommend you check it out.

The promotional pamphlet for Genus said it is quote fully programmed for beginners, yet is programmable for advanced users end quote. Now clearly, the Robotics International Corporation, which was the company behind Genus, saw how personal computers were beginning to take off in the consumer market, and they knew that they would need to remove some of the barriers of entry for the average person, that is, the average wealthy person.

Because this robot, depending on the options you picked, could cost upwards of twelve thousand dollars in ninety three, and when we adjust that for inflation, that's more than thirty thousand bucks today, a princely s I mean you could buy a car for that. Anyway, Genus was to have a lot of cool features that we would later m much later seeing products like the Roomba. It was supposed to be able to learn your home and map out the environment and learn where obstacles were, so it could

avoid bumping into things and maneuver around. It could return to its charging station on its own when its batteries got got really low. Uh. It could even be equipped with a vacuum. So gosh, I mean it was a roomba. I mean not really. It wasn't like an official roomba, but you get what I mean. The technology behind this was pretty impressive for the day. It included stuff like a computer system with at least forty eight whole killer

bytes of memory. Yalza, had a CRT display, had an optional keyboard so you could program it if you wanted to, had passive smoke detectors, motion detectors, and more. But Genus never got much further than its debut at CES and Robotics International Corporation would dissolve sometime in nine. Well, I think the product was far too ambitious for the time.

It was certainly an indicator of where things would eventually end up, although it would take a couple of decades, and we're still seeing companies like the aforementioned Samsung introduced large robots at c E S, so that trend continues as well. We don't tend to see those large robots actually getting adopted into the consumer market. But we see a lot of that technology kind of trickled down into

other implementations like roombot. Speaking of Samsung and robots, we're still waiting on BALI, that's the spherical robot that the company showed off at c E S. For that matter, we're still waiting on scout About. What's scout about? You ask, Well, it's about always being prepared if I remember correctly. Huh, how's a joke. No, really, The scout About was the name of a line of robots Samsung showed off at c E S. The scout About robots look like little

old domes on wheels. I read one review that said it looked like little motorcycle helmets that were scooting around. They could roam autonomously around your home, and the purpose of the scout About was to monitor your home for the purposes of safety. It was to have ultrasonic sensors as well as a passive infrared system, and it would let the robot sense everything from sounds to the presence

of smoke. And it also had a temperature sensor if it were to detect a danger like a fire or someone breaking a window to gain entry to a house, it could sound an alarm and phone home to a security service, which then could coordinate with authorities. Samsung said the plan was for the robots to hit the market by early spring of nineteen, with a price of somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars. So again, this is n that would be somewhere between eighteen hundred and

twenty seven dollars today. However, the scout about never it came out. Now, I'm not saying that last year's Bali robot will also never come out, Nor am I saying that Samsung's bought Handy robot demonstrated this year's virtual c e s will never come out. But I wouldn't hold my breath. All that being said, I think it's only fair I point out that, at least in some cases, it's not so much about a specific product, but rather

the advancement of the technologies that power that prototype or concept. So, in other words, the bot Handy, which Samsung showed off picking up a bottle of wine and pouring a glass of wine for somebody, or another video where it showed the robot filling up a dishwasher. It's not really necessarily

about the robot. It's showing off something that actually is pretty darn cool, and that's the fact that the AI guiding this robot gives the robot guidance on how hard or soft the robot's grip should be whenever it picked up something. You know, we humans get a pretty intuitive grasp on that kind of stuff to use a pun,

but for robots it's different. A robot doesn't innately know how tightly it needs to grip something, and so it might approach a cinder block or a breeze block for you folks in the UK, and a delicate champagne glass with the same amount of gripping force. That would probably not work out so well. It would either be two week a grip for the center block and so it wouldn't be able to pick it up, or it would crush the glass and it's mighty robotic hand. Either way,

not exactly the result you're looking for now. All that being said, the scout about was being demonstrated as if it were actually about to go on the market, so that particular example doesn't really fit into the hole. This is more about showing off a technology than making an actual product kind of thing. So maybe that was Samsung learning its lesson. Some times the stuff we see at C E S is really just meant to grab our attention period and doesn't indicate a sincere desire to bring

a product to market. I'm pretty sure that was the thinking that went into the twenty twenty robot marketed by Sherman that is, the toilet paper company, and it was called robot because that's genius, but not genus anyway. The company had a booth set up complete with a toilet where you could test out this robot, though you were encouraged to, you know, not actually use the toilet. The

things you learn after experience. So you would sit on the throne and you would call out for precious t P allegedly by using an app on your smartphone, and a little two wheeled self balancing robot with a face plate that looked kind of like a a semi abstract bear face, you know, very like like children's drawing kind

of bare face. The robot also had little ears on top of that that the toilet paper roll would sit between, and it would wheel out with that roll of toilet paper on balanced on top of its head, uh, you know, flat side down obviously, otherwise it just roll all over the place. And there was no way to see how the robot, which had no arms, is just the wheels and a box, and the toilet paper roll would be on top of the box. There's no way to see how the robot would get the roll of toilet paper

balanced on its head in the first place. I'm pretty sure there's just some poor booth attendee behind the scenes whose job it was to place rolls of toilet paper on the self balancing robot before it would wheel out of its alcove to the rescue. Again, this was never really meant to come across as a real product. It

was more of a marketing gimmick. It is too bad, however, because as we saw in getting hold of toilet paper was sometimes a challenge, and it would be really useful to have a robot bear do battle for you in grocery stores to get t P. But that was not meant to be Moving on. In five two years after Genus rolled around at CS Commodore, the computer company that had been a real contender in the early days of home computers, revealed a portable computer and what's amazing is

that this one did not weigh a ton. A lot of the early portable laptops were portable in name only. They typically had a handle like a briefcase, and it required a strong back to lug around places. But the Commodore l c D tipped the scales and a smelt five pounds or about two point three kilograms. The Commodore l c D looked a bit like a truncated laptop, or maybe like a typewriter connected to a small flip

up l c D screen. That screen could display up to sixteen lines of text, and it could run a subset of software that was programmed for Commodore computers, but the l c D was not fully compatible with the Commodore desktop line. Had a Rockwell sixty five C one O two processor running at a blistering one mega hurts clock speed. It boasted thirty two kilobytes of memory, but

it was expandable up to sixty four kilobytes. Now. While the company didn't announce a price for the planned product, analysts estimated that it would have likely retailed for around six hundred dollars, and in that would be let's see for today's money about one thousand, one forty bucks. This project became the victim of internal politics at Commodore, or

so the story goes. So the way the story works is that the CEO of Commodore, Marshall Smith, was talking to John Roach, the CEO of Tandy, another company that was selling home computers, and during that conversation, Roach told Smith that l c D s were going nowhere fast baby. Subsequently, Smith decided to cancel the Commodore l c D project, along with all other l c D related projects at Commodore, and legend says that only five prototypes of the Commodore l c D were ever made, but only two of

them have ever been officially verified. Let's jump around in time a bit and more and head up to I was actually at that ce S. One of the ways that companies will try to stand out from the crowd is to tap celebrities to announce or endorse products. I was not the celebrity. I'm not a celebrity at all. But these celebrities, these real celebrities, will make an appearance at ce S for what I believe could be described as here let me check my notes. Um, yeah, a

truckload of money at least I assume so. I mean, I have no idea how much Slash was paid to come on stage in two thousand and eight to play the opening riff of Welcome to the Jungle for Bill Gates and then just disappear and smoke. But I bet he was paid way more than I made that entire year. Anyway, in twenty eleven, a different celebrity showed off a product to all her little monsters. Yep, Lady Gaga was at

c E s in. I'm actually really upset I didn't get to go to the event where she announced this. I really wanted to see it. I wasn't terribly familiar with Lady Gaga, but I knew spectacle when I heard it, but unfortunately I was elsewhere. Anyway, she was partnering with Polaroid to allegedly design and then unveil the g L twenty glasses, a pair of very boxy looking sunglasses with a built in camera and a digital display that was also built into the frames. And I guess that with these,

Lady Gaga could become the Papa Rozzie oh Lah poker face. There. I've exhausted my Lady Gaga knowledge. Anyway, while Lady Gaga could wear the glasses and look fashionably weird, I most of us would just look weird wearing them. But it wouldn't matter, because a year later there were still no

g L twenty glasses on the market. Polaroid claimed to still be planning a rollout, but another year went by, and another, and by fourteen, Lady Gaga had bid au revoir to Polaroid and the two had parted ways, still

no glasses. Lady Gaga's involvement with the project definitely got a lot of attention, but in the end, there didn't seem to be much of a payoff, and depending upon the terms of that partnership, it may have been a big loss for Polaroid, which I think is a shame because I still have a soft spot for Polaroid cameras. We've got more gadgets that never made it to prime time coming up, but first let's take a quick break and now for the that Smells funny category for c

S gadgets that never went anywhere. And I'm being literal here because I want to chat about the I smell from the company digit Sense. Yeah, this was a real thing. I think of this as sort of the Internet generation version of Smellow Vision. This one made the news back in two thousand one, so this was way before I ever went to c E S. And I'm sorry about that, because I wish I could have seen it in action.

The device looked like a little pod with a shark fin like protrusion, and it had vents through which SENSE could pump. The ideas that you would load this thing up with some cartridges filled with scented oils, and the device would heat up specific oils before using a fan to blow the smell out of the vents. By heating different combinations of those oils, it could produce different SENSE and it would connect via USB to a computer. Now,

just imagine the possibilities. You're on your computer, you're checking out possible vacation destinations online, and you're looking at a beach in Hawaii, and then your nostrils detect the scent of an ocean breeze. Maybe there's even a hint of coconut there. Or maybe you're playing a video game and you're rushing through a burning building and you can actually smell something that resembles would smoke, Or maybe you're looking at an ad for cookies and you smell, I mean cookies.

You know, it definitely falls on the gimmicky side, but at the same time you can kind of see how incorporating smells into other computer activities could really increase a sense of immersion. The team behind the I Smell included Joel Lloyd Bellinson and Dexter Smith, both of whom had

backgrounds in business. They envisioned a database of smells with an algorithm that would best match sense to whatever it was the computer was, you know, encountering, so that way you would have a relevant smell, so you wouldn't just have, oh, that smells like and rubber while I'm looking at Daisies.

That would make no sense now, I'm sure. They also envisioned a world in which people would need to purchase refills for those scented oil cartridges, kind of similar to how printer companies really count on you having to order lots of new printer toner cartridges. But unfortunately for the team, the idea received a little more than ridicule, even for the name I Smell. Now, keep in mind they were

launching this or trying to in two thousand one. That was two years before Apple had even launched the iPod, so they were actually anticipating the eye trend. The company failed to release anything to market due to a distinct lack of consumer interest, and it faded away, and it really stinks. How about another category now, This one could be called the old bait and switch, or in this case,

the belt and switch. And I'm talking about Belty, which was one of those weird gadgets that gets a lot of buzz because you know, it's not another or big screen TV or fitness tracker. That's one of the reasons a lot of these gadgets get a lot of coverage. It's not just that they're weird, it is that they stand out because it's not yet another version of something that we see all the time. BELTI appeared in and it was a smart belt. Yeah, like the thing that

holds up your trousers. BELTI was supposed to be able to make automatic adjustments all on its own, tightening or loosening as the occasion demands, such as when you go from sitting down to standing up or vice versa. Small motors inside the buckle would activate and increase or decrease

the tension on the belt. Accompanying the smart belt was of course an app, and together belt and app would track activity and give you a running tab on your waistline, just in case you were worried that you were starting to feel a little too good about yourself. And it was going to market for around four hundred bucks. This version of BELTI, however, failed to materialize beyond the demo models that shows like c S. It was supposed to go to market later in and instead the Belty that

would ultimately come out was a very different device. You can buy a Belty today, but it is a ratchet style belt, so you can make minor adjustments, but you have to do so manually. There's no motorized buckle doing it for you. The smart part of the belt, the current Belty, is that it has a built in battery recharger, so you can charge your phone on your belt and plug your devices directly into the belt buckle. I guess

to give them more juice. Now, my guess is that this recharging battery and the belt is itself a lithium ion battery, and knowing how those can sometimes be a little dodgy, I'd be a bit hesitant to strap one right up against my pants. I mean, it's probably Okay, right, I mean phones don't usually spawn taneously combust unless it's the Samsung Galaxy Notes seven and a yeah, I'm gonna skip BELTI but hey, Jonathan, I hear you ask. Yes,

that's right, I can hear you. How about you talk about a product that was demonstrably a bad idea and that is why it never came to market. Okay, I guess I will. Let's talk about the Mattel Aristotle because who boy? Was that a bad idea and the reaction to it would ultimately lead Mattel to cancel launch plans for this device. Mattel unveiled the gadget at c E S And if you really want an easy way to describe this thing, all you have to do is say it's Alexa, but you know, for kids, shout out to

the Hudsucker proxy for that one. Anyway, it was a smart home assistant similar to Amazon Echo or Google Home. Bundled with the smart speaker device was a camera, and the whole package was supposed to retail for three dollars. The back end of the system included stuff like image recognition algorithms that could recognize specific things within a child's room. Those specific things. I'm sure we'll surprise no one could include other Mattel toys. I'm gonna paint a picture for you.

Not the Mattel ever said this, But this is just something that I imagined when I was reading up on it. So think for a moment that you're a little kid and you're in your room, and then suddenly the smart robot that lives in a speaker says to you, Hey, little so and so, how about you go pick up that Hot Wheels car and play with it? Room room. That sure is fun, isn't it. Man? You know what helps would be fun if you had the super Ultra

Deluxe Stunt Spectacular Hot Wheels set. Then that car would go really fast and you would be the most super awesome cool kid in the universe. Hey, how about we ask Santa for that this year? Yeah, that's a great idea you had, so and so. All right, So I'm definitely taking some major poetic license here, but you get to where I'm going right, The idea being this could easily become a tool that Mattel could have used to

try and convince kids to get more Mattel toys. Numerous critics also pointed out the other very glaring problems with privacy that a connected device complete with webcam would represent for parents. And the fact is, Mattel did plan for the smart device to allow you to do stuff like place orders for things like diapers, for example, because Aristotle could switch from child mode, where it would play with kids,

to adult mode and then tap into Amazon's Alexa assistant. Now, I found all of this particularly surprising, not because the company would try to tap into that market that I think was inevitable, but rather because Tell had already been burned pretty badly with a Barbie doll called Hello Barbie from earlier on. This WiFi connected doll was vulnerable to being hijacked. According to a security researcher named Matt Jakubowski, they could turn into a surveillance tool and spy on kids.

And that is beyond terrifying and so, faced with some very tough questions, including some coming from politicians, Mattel decided to scuttle the plans for Aristotle later in Alright, I've talked about failed products, marketing, gimmicks, and stuff that falls somewhere in between, But how about something that was called a scam? I mean, that's what some people said the Phantom console was all about. And I've talked about the Phantom and other episodes recently when I talked about Google Stadia.

In two thousand four, the company behind the Phantom in Phinium Labs, showed off the Phantom at c e S at Windows Embedded Devices stand only it wasn't switched on or connected to anything. It was really, you know, a box. At this point, there was already speculation online that in Phinium Labs wasn't totally on the up and up. There were message boards filled with threads by users who claimed to have visited the listed office address for the company

only to find unoccupied space. There were investigations into the people behind the company, but the fact that the company was part of c E S and associated with Microsoft made people wonder if perhaps it was legit. Despite those early misgivings. At c e S two thousand five, in

Phinium Labs would appear at the Nvidio booth. Visitors to the booth had a chance to actually play games on the console, but those games had already been installed on the device, which meant no one could see how long it would take to download a full game to the Phantom. That's what the Phantom was meant be. It had no optical drive, you were to download over a broadband connection

all the games you wanted to play on it. It also meant that people would point out that this made the Phantom no different from any other kind of computer, because there are already computers that run the games that were running on the Phantom. So, as far as anyone knew, the Phantom so far consisted of a fabricated case that could be around an otherwise mundane collection of PC parts. The Phantom missed launch date after launch date, and eventually it was clear that it was never going to come

out at all. Whether it was all a hoax from the beginning or it was just a case of a product languishing in development remains an open question. I'd like to think that the team working on the Phantom were sincere in their efforts. I have suspicions about some of the business leaders, but I also suspect that the engineers at in Phinium Labs were really trying to make a good,

robust system. In Vidium Labs would eventually produce actual products, but they fell into categories like keyboards and stuff, not actual consoles. One thing I've seen at numerous c e S shows are devices that claim to read your brain waves and generate a response based on them. That response could be anything from an app encouraging you to relax if it senses that you know you're being really tense and anxious, or it could be a game where your

concentration affects what's going on. I'm reminded of a game called mind Flex that I saw at C E S one year. This one actually came out, so this is something that did make it to market. This was a toy from Mattel, or at least you know, distributed by Mattel, that used a column of air to suspend a ping

pong ball as if the ball were levitating. A fan inside the game's base would provide the column of air, and you would wear a headset and by focusing, you could cause that column of air to raise or lower the ball. Essentially, what you're doing is changing the RPM speed of the fan that's generating the column of air. Meanwhile, a rotating playing field would introduce various obstacles, and only by making the ball move to the correct height would

you be able to get through all the obstacles. The headset relies on e G. Readings of brain waves, or at least that's the claim. Now there's some disagreement about whether or not it really works the way they claim it does, or if it just presents the illusion of control. But I don't see why it wouldn't be at least theoretically possible, assuming you had decent sensors because e G s, you know, picking up e G signals through the skull.

That's a little tricky. But anyway, let's get back to what I really wanted to cover, and that's the Atari mind Blink, which in some ways sounds similar like the mind flex. This was a device that had a wearable component to it. You would put on what looked like a plastic headband had a wire attached to it that would lead to an Atari console and you try to control a video game using not your thoughts. Despite the name mind link, you weren't, you know, focusing. Instead, you

were using the muscles in your forehead. The band had infrared sensors that would pick up the movement of those muscles, so by tensing or relaxing your forehead, you could send commands as if you were holding some sort of controller. Uh, it wouldn't work with just any game. It's not like you could hook this up to an to play any title.

They had specific titles made for this device in particular. Uh, the inputs are pretty primitive, so they were more like the type of controls you would have with a paddle based game like Breakout or Pong or something like that. The mind Link was supposed to come out in four

but you know it didn't now. At the time, Atari was also dealing with the total collapse of the home video game market because the industry had suffered a autostrophic failure in nineteen three due to many different factors, including a saturation of the market and some supremely bad business decisions, along with a lot of just garbage systems and games. And no one was coming out of this sparkling clean. Everybody had made some dumb decisions leading up to this,

and so the mind Link was never actually meant to be. Besides, I hear a lot of users would actually get really tired after using it for just a couple of minutes because they were scrunching up their foreheads like crazy just to get through a game, which doesn't sound like much fun. Okay, we've got some more examples to chat about in a bit,

but first let's take another quick break. Of course, not every gadget that fails to make it to market debuts at c S. In fact, some companies preferred to announce their latest innovation well outside the c e S trade show window because it can be pretty hard to get noticed in all the hoopla at c e S. And there are a few examples of concepts and prototypes that we learned about elsewhere that likewise never became a product

that you could actually buy. So I thought it would cover a couple of the more notable ones we learned about these examples outside the c e S show floor. And sometimes the stuff we see announced is coming out of a company that is going through a tumultuous time, and the reason that the gadget never makes it beyond the showroom floor is because of big changes inside the

company in an effort for it to remain relevant. That's kind of what happened to the Commodore l c D, It's kind of what happened to the Atari mind Link, and it's also kind of what happened to the Palm Folio, which I thought was a genuinely neat idea. Back in the day, as the name tells you, the device came

from Palm Incorporated. Palm was known for being a leader in personal digital assist stints back in the day, and for those young uns among you, a personal digital assistant in those days was kind of like a primitive smartphone,

only without the phone part. You would use one to manage your contacts, take notes, keep your calendar, that kind of thing, and typically you would physically connect these early PDAs to a computer, usually using some sort of proprietary cable or cradle, and you would synchronize data from a computer program to your p d A. But by two thousand seven, when Palm announced the Folio, Palm had progressed from the simple PDAs of the past and was not

making smartphones like the Trio. Now, these smartphones catered more to working professionals than to the mainstream crowd, kind of like BlackBerry. Palm was a brand used mostly by white collar executive types plus some nerdy tech journalist types that I know, though there was some adoption beyond that niche market. One such line of smartphones from Palm, as I mentioned, was the Trio line of devices, and the Folio was

meant as a companion for handsets like the Trio. The Folio was a very small laptop, categorized as a sub notebook. In fact, if it had just come out a couple of years later, we probably would have called it a netbook. The computer didn't have super hefty specs. It was meant to be a versatile, lightweight device that had a long battery life. It used Lennox as its operating system. It had two hundred fifty six megabytes of memory, a four hundred sixteen mega Hurts processor, and an lc D display.

It was meant to be paired with a smartphone. It had WiFi, but functions like email would work in concert with the phone, rather than going from the Folio to the WiFi network directly. It was a bit of an odd duck in that regard. Palm marketed the device as an alternative to heavier laptop computers, and pointed out that pairing it with a smartphone would give users Internet access even if there were no WiFi networks available in their area.

The pitch was really toward business users who travel a lot, as the device suspects didn't fill many people with confidence that you could use it to do other stuff like, you know, watch videos or anything along those lines. But then that's not the purpose that Palm was pushing it for. The Folio never made it two stores. Palm actually canceled it,

choosing instead to focus on refreshing its smartphone technologies. Palm was in a bit of an existential crisis at the time, with analysts suspecting that the company would either go out of business or accept some other companies offered to buy

it out. In two thousand eight, Palm showed off the web Os operating system that's web Os and introduced the Palm Pre smartphone at that year's ce S. That's the product that actually did make it to market, but the Pre failed to gain much traction in a market that was already being dominated by Apple and the iPhone. And it didn't help that Palm had signed an exclusive deal with Sprint as the mobile carrier that limited the amount of people that Palm could reach because it was only

for Sprint customers. In Hewlett Packard announced it was acquiring Palm for one point to billion dollars in an all cash deal. HP would later end all support for Palm and web Os devices, and it seemed like Palm was well and truly dead, but in a company called t c L revealed it had acquired the Palm brand name, and so the name lives on, though you could make an argument that there's very little connective tissue to the

old Palm company. T c L, by the way, was one of the companies that this past c E S showing off concept smartphones with expanding oh LED screens, kind of similar to the l G rollable. While we're on the subject of innovative portable computing devices, let's talk about the Microsoft Courier. Like the Folio, this was a concept that we learned about outside of c S, with most reports about the prototype device appearing in late two thousand nine.

This predated Apple's launch of the iPad, which makes it even more impressive. Really, the idea was for a dual screen portable computer device similar to a tablet, but really more of a booklet. The device could fold into a closed position like a book, with the two screens facing one another. The device included a touch screen that users could interact with using either their finger or a stylus. The pitch for Courier was that this was meant to

be a device to allow for content creation. It was meant for creatives who had less of an emphasis on traditional productivity applications, and that set it as distinct from Microsoft's mainstream strategy. It ran on a modified version of Windows, and ultimately the act that it didn't fall right in

line with Microsoft product strategy kind of doomed the courier. Also, a different team inside Microsoft was working to develop a Windows variant for tablet computers, which would represent a forked development path, and that in general is a bad thing if you want a cohesive strategy. By Microsoft had killed the project. Now I mentioned Razor and it's Project Hazel, which is a smart mask within certification that we don't

really expect to see come to market. There's also Project Brooklyn, the smart gaming chair concept that has a rollable display that extends from the back of the chair over the head of the person who's sitting in the chair. Then it stretches the screen out right in front of them at head level. I don't think we're going to see either of those in the real world, at least not in those forms. But Razor has a history of doing this, not that I think the company is trying to pull

a fast one or anything. It's often using some pretty ambitious designs to help push the general industry forward or to propose alternatives to how things are traditionally done. The fact that these projects might not ever hit the consumer

market is kind of a drag. But in the process of creating these projects, Razor is pushing designers and engineers to think beyond their normal parameters, and that can often lead to technologies we actually will see out in the wild, although they often do not resemble the audacious projects that spawned those technologies. Take Project Christine, for example. This was a really cool idea that Razor floated in two thousand fourteen. It was a PC design with an incredibly modular approach.

So imagine a stand. This is your base computer unit, and in the stand you could plug various modules, like a module that has a CPU in it, or one that has a specific GPU, or maybe it's a power supply module or a memory module or it's storage. You can mix and match. You could create a customized PC to your liking, and you wouldn't have to worry about stuff that otherwise is a big part of building your own PC, like is this processor compatible with this motherboard?

All that would be taken care of for you, and the modular design means it would be easy to swap out components. So let's say your graphics card is getting a little bit long in the tooth. You could unplug that module from your base tower and swap in a new GPU module or maybe multiple GPUs, and each module would have its own cooling system. According to Razor, it was active liquid cooling, and it also had noise cancelation, so it would run quietly. What it did not have

is a release date. And again this isn't to really lay fault at Razor's feet. A project as ambitious as Christine would require buy in from more than just consumers. Razor would have to partner with the various companies that were making GPUs and epus and memory cards and power supplies and all that other stuff. There would need to be a coordinated effort to build out modules that were

compatible with the system. And you know that just didn't happen, and there's a lot of inertia to overcome in the PC space to make something like Christine a reality. I think it was a really interesting idea, one that could be transformational if enough companies agreed to make components that

would fit the modular standard. But I'm also not surprised that there wasn't a lot of buy in on that front, because pretty much everyone wants to be the one to define the standard rather than the one who has to conform to the standards that were made by somebody else. Another Razor project that wild crowds but did not transition to a consumer product was project Ariana, a projector. This

one was really wild. So this projector had two three D cameras that would actually be used to scan the room you had it in, so that way it would the perfect projection. And then when it was time for you, to, say, play a game, the projector would communicate with that game and effectively extend your viewing area beyond the borders of

your display. So you're still playing your game on your computer looking at your computer screen, but the projector extends that view beyond what you see on the screen, so you can kind of see, you know, beyond the edges of the frame. It is really an interesting notion. The projector would also create interesting lighting effects to coordinate with the game and enhance your experience. It really did sound super nifty. I'm sad this one never really made it

beyond the conceptual stage because it sounds truly immersive. Uh, maybe it would also be a little on the unfair side. I mean, if you're able to extend your view beyond what most people can see, maybe then you could, if you're playing a competitive game, see players before they could put possibly see you. I s. That might be a thing that could be an issue. But how about Project Valerie. This was a Razor concept laptop that featured not one,

not two, but three screens. The screens would sit in a stack, so you could use it as a single screen laptop, or folding arms could extend a pair of extra displays, one to either side of the central screen. Razor called it a way to create surround view with a resolution of eleven thousand, five twenty by two thousand sixty. That's a crazy resolution. They also called it twelve K because it would be a four K screen. Of four

K screen and a four K screen. You could get a real panoramic view of a game this way, or maybe you could use it so that you're playing a game on one screen, you're looking at oh B S over at Twitch on a second screen, and then you're monitoring chat on your third screen, which would make this laptop the portable video game streamer rig of Dreams and Wonders.

But Valerie also never came to market. There are some multi screen laptops out there these days, but they tend to be in a very different form factor than what we saw with the Valorie concept. For example, the Asus r O g SZI Furious Duo fifteen, which has a main display and then just mounted above where the keyboard is, there's a little hinged system that tilts up a bit

where you have a touch screen display. That touch screen is very wide, but it's also very short, so it's not like a true it's not a second screen that that mirrors the size of your primary screen. It's uh an additional workspace, really a touch screen workspace. I don't know how useful it is. I don't know how well it works as an extension of your main screen, but it is interesting that we're seeing some actual consumer product versions of a laptop that has more than one screen.

It might not be the enormous beast that Valerie was, but it's a step in that direction. And that's all I've got for today's episode. Clearly, there are countless other examples of products that were announced at one point, but never ever made it to the consumer market. They're probably a lot more failures out there than successes. In fact, I'm sure there's tons that we never heard of, and that's just the nature of things. If you're trying something new,

it's not always gonna work. But I do like the spirit of innovation. I like the creativity. I like the audacity of some of these projects that uh never made it. I'm very curious what what the world would be like if the I smell had really taken off. I hate to think of what some of my favorite websites would smell like. I guess I don't have to worry about that. I hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff. I guess not classic. It's only like two years old, right,

not even but I hope you enjoyed it. We will be back tomorrow with brand new episodes of tech Stuff. We are going to have an incredible twenty three I'm just I'm putting that out in the universe. I don't believe in the wish or any of those things, but I you know what, I'll take whatever I can get because I think I think we need a good, solid, positive year I'm not sure we're going to get it, but I'm gonna do my best, and I'm sure all

of you out there will. We'll try your best to Hope you're well, hope you had a wonderful New Year celebration, and I will talk to you again really soon. Y Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.