The Coolest Prototypes and Concept Pieces of CES 2024

These products might never turn up on store shelves, but they're fun excursions into what's possible, and the ideas here might someday trickle down into real-world products. 

Razer always brings at least one concept prototype to CES, and this year's is called Project Esther. It's a portable chair pad that attaches to your existing gaming chair (or just regular chair), and provides haptic feedback based on the game you're playing. It also works with videos and music, but gaming is where the idea really shines. 

It has 16 haptic actuators inside, and connects to your PC via a wireless dongle (it also has a power cable to plug into a wall outlet). In my hands-on demo, I played Mortal Kombat and MechWarrior 5, and could feel vibrations move from left to right and feel different feedback based on which weapon I was using. In MK, the system used general input from the game to determine what haptic feedback to give me, while in MechWarrior, a mod based on Razer's SDK created extremely specific feedback custom-programmed for that game. 

The Magic Bay is a magnetic accessory port already built into some Lenovo ThinkBook laptops. But for now, there's only one accessory available for it -- a 4K webcam. At CES 2024, however, Lenovo showed all a wide range of possible future accessories that ranged from practical to playful. 

The most practical include a clip-on SSD and a hub with extra ports and connections. There was also a small clip-on second display. On the more unusual side, I saw a clip-on mirror/selfie light combo, but my favorite was the tiny robot companion built into a small circular screen. 

Right now the animated "robot" doesn't do much more than smile and wink at you. However, I could see it providing contextual feedback in the future, like app notifications. But for right now, sometimes a smiling robot companion is all you need. 

You may think your desktop looks cool, but I bet it doesn't have an animated LED crystal film screen over the entire case window. 

This concept piece from MSI is one of the most imaginative case mods I've seen in some time, and I love the idea of a giant programmable animation playing across the case window. MSI says it's prohibitively expensive to mass produce, but this is one prototype I'm hoping makes its way into the real world. 

See-through screens have been on the periphery of TV technology for years, with transparent LCD and OLED experiments being ok, but not stunning. The new transparent micro-LED technology shown off by Samsung at CES 2024, is a different case altogether. 

In Samsung's demo, test footage on the 1cm-thick screen was clear and bright and looked amazing. I could see this being used as an overlay on top of other content -- like the window in a luxury box at a sporting event, or built into a car's windshield. There's no plan to build this into an actual product just yet, but it's the best example of transparent screen tech I've seen to date. 

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Micro Center Editor-in-Chief Dan Ackerman is a veteran tech reporter and has served as Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo and Editorial Director at CNET. He's been testing and reviewing laptops and other consumer tech for almost 20 years and is the author of The Tetris Effect, a Cold War history of the world's most influential video game. Contact Dan at dackerman@microcenter.com.