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The wireless TV future is now? Displace shows off a 55-inch, 20-pound TV.
- Displace, a new start-up tech company has announced an upcoming 55-inch TV that’s completely wireless.
- It runs on four rechargeable and replaceable batteries, and it can be stuck on any wall without needing any other hardware.
- The company is already taking deposits for this new TV, which will launch in late 2023 for the price of $2,999.
Sometimes when we attend the Consumer Electronics Show, we come across a small company with a product that really stand out from the crowd. At CES 2023, we got to see one of these kinds of companies and devices. Displace is a six-person company that showed off a 55-inch smart TV that’s completely wireless.
When we say that, we mean it. The demo unit we saw running didn’t have any wires coming out of it at all. That’s because it runs on four rechargeable batteries that are supposed to power the TV for up to a month on one charge (assuming the TV is used six hours out of every day). The advantage of having such a TV is that you are not stuck trying to find a power outlet. You can literally put it up on any flat surface, even a window. Also, there’s no messy power cord management to deal with.
You may ask, “Wait, it doesn’t use any wall brackets?” Nope, it doesn’t. The Displace TV weighs about 20 pounds, and it uses what it calls it’s custom “active-loop vacuum technology.” Basically, it has two big but slim suction pads on the back that anyone can place next to a flat wall or window, and it will connect and stay in place. We were told in our demo that Displace will be testing the TV to ensure it stays in place even if a room gets hit with big shakes or even an earthquake.
Another aspect of the Displace TV is that since it’s so light and can stick easily to walls, you can connect more than one of these TVs together. In theory, you could buy and connect four of these TVs to form one 8K 110-inch television. You could even connect 16 of the Displace TV units together for one huge 16K 220-inch image.
You can get one image on four TVs because they all connect wirelessly to a base unit somewhere else in the house. This base station, which requires a power socket, can connect up to six of these TVs at once. It’s not clear if this station will also allow you to connect something like a game console so you can play video games on the TV.
Another thing that’s different about this TV is that it has no remote. Instead, it has a 4K camera that pops out of the top. The TV then uses the camera to sense hand gestures, which you use to control the TV’s interface from the couch. Unfortunately, during our demo, the Wi-Fi was not working, so we were not able to see this feature at work.
The company is already taking fully refundable deposits of $299 on its website to secure pre-orders for the Displace TV. Once it’s ready to be ordered, people with deposits can order one for $2,999, two for $5,999, and four for $8,999. Considering Samsung is currently selling a 98-inch TV for close to $15,000, getting two or more seems like a bargain if you combine four of them into one TV.
So, is this really the future? It’s easy to dazzle reporters at a controlled demo, but it’s much harder when a product meets the real world. Will the TV really stick to any flat wall with no extra hardware? Will this base station work to stream content to the TV? Will the hand gestures work well, or will it have issues similar to Microsoft’ Kinect camera on its Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles? If this Displace TV does work as well as it did in our demo, this could be a big revolution in TV hardware.