Transcript & Summary: The Most Interesting Displays In The World!

[00:02] So MacBooks don't have touchscreens, but what if they did? This thing here is called the Magic Screen by Intricuit. It's a touch-sensitive, flexible glass that snaps onto a MacBook with magnets, plugs in via USB Type-C, and immediately gives that Mac a full corner-to-corner... touchscreen. And it works exactly how you'd expect. You can scroll up and down websites and in apps and poke around, do a little bit of photo editing. Of course, all of the iPhone mirroring in macOS Tahoe works even better since now you're [00:35] controlling the app as it was meant to be controlled with your fingertip. So this is obviously a bit of a hack to make this possible... It's actually literally pretending to be a trackpad to the laptop. But as far as hacks go, it's actually pretty well thought out. They've thought about the wobble that comes with touching the screen and made this accessory folio case for it that holds the display up nicely. They've thought about travel with it, so it tucks into here really cleverly to make it go with you [01:00] everywhere the MacBook goes. You also obviously don't want to accidentally close the glass into the laptop and maybe break it. So they designed this corner USB Type-C port to also be a stopper. So it literally doesn't let you make that mistake. They even made this stylus accessory as well. So you can use this... off of the laptop separately like a transparent Wacom tablet. And that gives it hovering and pressure sensitivity, and it has a 100-hour battery life. But the elephant in the room with all of this [01:26] is the MacBook Pro update we're expecting later this year, if you haven't already heard, is we're expecting a redesign with an OLED... and a touchscreen. And so knowing that, that kind of makes this product feel like it has a ticking expiration date. But I do think it's worth considering. Not everybody who kind of wants a touchscreen is gonna just have to go out and upgrade and buy a new $5,000 laptop to get it. Especially when their M2 or M3 is still working perfectly well and, and probably still will for a couple more years. [01:53] And the thing is, I think when that MacBook Pro comes out, it's actually going to make this product... better too. Because as of right now, macOS is simply not built for touchscreens, like they've never had touchscreens. The whole thing is designed for mouse and keyboard input... And so yeah, some parts kind of look like they're starting to lean more towards touch controls, like Control Center and some of these insane controls. But that's a rant for another day. But the point is, when they do come out with that touchscreen laptop, [02:20] they will also have to update macOS... to be more touch-friendly in some ways, like some larger touch targets and some more adaptive UI... And so those things will make it to all of these, and that will make this easier to use. So things like the stoplight window controls, which are definitely too small to consistently press on the first try, that could get way easier... Grabbing the top of a window to move it around, things like that won't be such impossibly small touch targets anymore. So that's the bright side. [02:47] They say they're planning on shipping a $150-ish version... after a Kickstarter later this year, which definitely makes me nervous, but I'm wishing them luck. I'm still not the biggest touchscreen laptop person myself, but I think there's definitely people out there who will love this. I'm gonna link it below... It's definitely Dope Tech. Now this video is all about Dope Tech, that is... displays. And so this one by definition may be pushing that limit just a little bit because it's, it's a volumetric display, [03:17] a.k.a. a hologram. Now we've already done an entire Studio channel video all about this... and how it works and why it technically isn't actually a hologram. But you know what, the technicality doesn't matter as much. The idea is that it's creating the effect... of a hologram, which is this cool object displayed in 3D space... that people can gather around and view it on almost at 360 degrees. And the way that it's creating this effect is actually kind of insane. So this is what it looks like when it's off, [03:50] actually. Right. So you can see here, it's actually... two displays... back-to-back... and rotating around this center axis here. And you can actually see individual pixels. 'Cause it's not that super high resolution of a screen, but that's gonna make a lot more sense in a second. So like you've probably seen one of those spinning fan displays before. If you spin that one line of pixels around really, really fast, you can make a circle. And so if you pulse those LEDs so that they're in the exact same position, [04:17] each time they light up, you get a floating dot in space... like a pixel. So when you stack a bunch of these lines, that's when you start to add this Z-axis of depth. But that's also when it gets incredibly complicated. Now it's back on again. This thing spins at 900 RPM, which is about 15 times... every second... And as it spins that fast, you can see when it lights these things up, instead of just one dot or one line at a time, which would look like a floating slice, now it has to take 3D objects and display all of the slices next to [04:53] each other with perfect timing, so that as the panels spin around, it creates the illusion of 3D objects with actual... volume... sort of hovering still in space. And this is an incredibly complex feat of a ton of processing, because, since a full rotation is divided into 480 unique slices, that means just to do 30 FPS video, you have to update these displays 7,200 times per second. 7,200Hz refresh rate on these displays just to show this object at 30 frames per second. That is insane. And that's also why it's not the highest-resolution display in the world, [05:30] because there's already a ton of compute going on just to make this possible. Also, fun fact, there's even a little bit more processing headroom necessary... for error correction, because these motors don't necessarily spin at exactly 900 RPM. And so it has to make sure these things all line up perfectly. But when they do—well, you're gonna have to take my word for it because it's incredibly hard to capture. But... it does look great. It looks so cool in person. Obviously, the display is partially covered up here by a glass dome, [05:58] partially for safety, but also partially to keep the display spinning with less air resistance inside. So there's a lot going on here. But, yeah, there's specialized software to show... these images... and 3D objects made specifically to be shown on volumetric displays. And I just haven't seen anything else that looks quite like it. If you're interested in more on recording holograms, or why someone might want to beat me up for even calling this a hologram in the first place, definitely watch this. [06:24] The Studio video... linked below. It is one of the most interesting pieces of tech that's ever come through the studio. Definitely dope tech. All right, so I know I just got rated S-tier chef by Nick DiGiovanni. And it's cool and everything (small flex), but I also appreciate when cooking is extremely easy. And that's where our video sponsor, CHEF iQ, comes in. See, this piece here is the tech we're all familiar with, but it's connected to this mini oven, and it turns it into a fully connected cooking setup. [06:52] Just the oven by itself is already sick. You can just pop onto the screen whatever you want to cook: fish, chicken, steak, or even eggs. And it knows how to cook it perfectly. It can air fry, it can bake, broil, dehydrate, whatever. There's literally 10+ cooking modes built in and it does all of them well. So you can replace multiple things on your countertops. And if we go ahead and check on these, yeah, perfectly toasted. Something else this is really good at, by the way, is eggs. Might not be expected, but it actually comes with [07:21] this egg tray. You can crack an egg in six of these and make fried eggs basically perfectly every single time, however you want. Something else to note people don't really think about, is this still gets up to 500 degrees, but it is way smaller than a traditional oven, and so it preheats way faster. So I've been using my traditional oven less. But even better, pair it with the iQ Sense thermometer. And now it knows when the food is done. So like if it's chicken, it knows what the internal temps should be and it nails that [07:48] every single time. And of course there's an app too. So now if I have something going for much longer, I totally leave the room and then I can check on progress at any time and of course get a notification when it's actually done. So if you too wanna be an S-tier chef, but way easier, you can save 40% with code MKBHD at the link in the description. And yes, I did say 40%. You're welcome. All right, onto the next item... Okay, so This monitor, it almost looks reasonable because of how far away from it I'm sitting right now, [08:18] but it's not. This is a 52-inch ultrawide... 6K... slightly curved... 120Hz... Thunderbolt monitor from Dell. And Dell actually came out with a bunch of interesting displays this year, but this, in my opinion, is the most interesting one. And the reason it's interesting to me, is because I've been a dual-monitor person for a long time. You've seen my desk setups. This is the first single monitor that I actually feel like I could use. And I've tried a lot of ultrawides, but the first single monitor I think I could actually use to replace... [08:48] dual monitors and like go all the way and not lose a beat. So first of all, 6K resolution, of course, that's 6144 by 2560. So it's not 8K or anything, but it's still enough pixels that it works out to be basically the same pixel density as a 27-inch 4K monitor. So 129 pixels per inch. Text is still super sharp. Corners are crisp, so you could sit much closer to it without it breaking down at all... And then it just looks really good. Especially for not being an OLED. It has these thin bezels all the way around. [09:18] It's a slightly anti-glare finish. And it's an IPS panel, 100% sRGB and 99% of DCI-P3 color. It's not like the absolute highest-end color grading type of panel, but it is $3,000. And for all that money you do get a very physically impressive, an imposing display. But the feature that makes this really interesting, especially for someone who uses multiple machines, is this has a built-in KVM switch for up to four computers at once and then a bunch of really nice software surrounding it. So you've got Thunderbolt 4, there's two HDMI 2.1 ports, [09:47] two DisplayPort 1.4 ports. You can have multiple machines plugged in and then switch between them with one keyboard and mouse. And that's basically what it's designed around. So instead of, you know, picture-in-picture, they have these picture-by-picture modes with screen partitioning into a bunch of different arrangements that this is what makes it a viable replacement for dual displays. You can even put everything on a single display, even from multiple machines. It's a multi-monitor setup on one monitor all at once. [10:13] And the slight curve is also really nice. You can kind of see here at the edges there are some much more dramatically curved ultrawide monitors. And that's... It looks cool and everything, but this is a little closer to mimicking the actual angle that I have my dual displays in front of me at my desk. Because when you have two big displays next to each other, having them flat just ends up making the corners really far away from you when you're sitting in the middle. But the slight curve... just helps just. It's a subtle thing, [10:36] but it helps keep things a little bit more directly in front of you so there's less head turning. And that Thunderbolt 4 connection, that'll do the 140 watts of power. So you plug it into your laptop through the single cable you're charging you're displaying. You can get two and a half gig Ethernet through there all at once. It's great. So for the person who wants one display to rule them all for their entire desk setup, this is probably the one right now. It might cost two displays, but... it kind of is two displays. [11:01] So I like it. It's dope tech. Okay, let me ask you a question... Smart glasses... or VR headset? Which one are you more into? Because a smaller wearable pair of glasses you can wear all day and it gives you convenient stuff like a heads-up display with notifications and directions and translations and it looks inconspicuous... Or there's the full-on headset which has the nicest displays but it completely takes over your vision for the most immersive, detailed, high-resolution content experience. If you answered [11:30] neither, but you still kind of like some parts of both. Well, perfect then. Meet Project Aura and this is an exclusive brand new first look here and... actually I can't think of a better way to explain it than just basically being right in between. They're a collab between XREAL, Google and Qualcomm to bring these to life. And I don't know if you've seen some of the other XREAL glasses, but they're actually very simple. The idea is you essentially have... a stationary display that you put in front of your face [11:57] and now you have like a hundred-inch display effectively wherever you want to go. It's clever. but that was very much plug-and-play with other devices. This new Project Aura runs Android XR... which means a couple things. First of all, it's its own computer. It's wired to this smartphone-sized puck here by USB Type-C. And then it has its own sensors around the frames so that it can bring in your environment... and it... anchor the graphics in physical space... So those two cameras on the corners on the outside are just for tracking. [12:24] And then there's a single RGB camera in the middle. So when you fire these up, you look like... this. but you see this... Android XR... locked hovering in space in front of you. And then you can do everything here that you could do in the VR headset. You can open any of those Android apps, watch videos move around virtual environments and they're pretty good-looking displays too to my eye. 1920 by 1200 per eye. They're micro-OLED at 72 FPS but obviously the 70-degree field of view, it's nice for glasses, [12:55] but that's going to be less than a full-on VR headset. The key though is it's going to be way cheaper and lighter than a full-on VR headset. So 91 grams to be exact... And so you're sort of, you're trading off the immersiveness of a full-on headset for the ability to see a bit more around you it's looking through real glass to see the actual environment... behind the UI. And so since they're lighter, they end up a bit more comfortable, and you might even be tempted to get up and walk around in them or just [13:23] wear them for a longer period of time than you would have worn a headset. There's this feature that lets you, while you're watching a video, pin it to the corner of your vision so you can walk around with it like a little mini video player... in a little HUD in the corner of your vision... It's kind of perfect for doing the chores and walking around or doing the dishes while listening to the Waveform podcast. Like before, to take a video with you in a VR headset, you'd, like, have to pinch it and hold it, and then [13:46] hold it while you're walking around, literally taking it with you. So they've clearly thought about how much more likely you are to do that with these glasses than a regular headset. And then if you ever just want to watch a video or movie with just a black background instead of the environment around you, the glass has an electrochromic tint that... built-in, so you can black them out with the click of a button, which is pretty fire. The glass... all the way clear is like the equivalent of a light pair of sunglasses. [14:11] It's not totally clear, but you can still definitely see the real world with the AR elements locked in. And then all the way tinted is basically pitch black. So when this actually goes on sale, the pitch is actually going to be... split computing, which is basically just the idea that you have the compute in the glasses and the compute in the puck as separate. And that comes with some unique advantages. Like the puck is running the new Snapdragon Reality Elite chip inside. So it's high-end now... [14:39] and has a power button that doubles as a fingerprint reader. And the whole front of it is a touchpad that's doing most of the compute. It runs the OS, it runs all the AI stuff... But when someday maybe that gets outdated, you can upgrade just the puck and then plug it in by USB Type-C to the frames... Or maybe someday in the future, you decide, yeah, I kind of want better frames. I want a wider field of view or more resolution or whatever it is. Some new frames come out... okay, then you can upgrade just the frames and keep the same computer. [15:07] I was already super impressed just with the tracking from such few sensors and cameras and the super low latency. With this setup as it is, it's literally 3 milliseconds on this setup versus around 12 milliseconds on the Vision Pro. But yeah, the idea is this is somewhat modular so you can update it one piece at a time... in the future... And that alone is very clever. Literally less than a year ago was my video titled "Wait, smart glasses are actually good now..." with the latest AR glasses from Meta. [15:35] But... like eight months later we already have all this choice, all these different ideas of how these companies want to execute on... face computer stuff. That's fascinating and it is dope tech. Thanks for watching! Catch you guys in the next one. Peace!