Samsung Cool: Guitar with LED cue lights

As it does this time of year, Samsung unveiled the C-Lab incubator program for THE 2022 International Consumer Electronics Show with the goal of evaluating customer responses and pushing the most promising ideas further. This year's star project is ZamStar, a guitar and app combo designed to make collaboration and learning easier. Other notable projects include an AI solution that helps children develop good smartphone habits, and a parenting phone that can detect infant strabismus (crossed eyeballs) at an early stage.

ZamStar consists of an app and a custom guitar called ZamString. The idea is that you can play a piece on the guitar, add effects, and sync with other musicians around the world. This is clearly a remake of the COVID-19 TikTok music collaboration trend (remember those at the beginning of the year), and the idea is to make your music easily synchronized. Meanwhile, the Zam String guitar has a fretboard that is lit up by the input of the song, making it easy for you to figure out where to put your fingers. This isn't a new concept, but it's perhaps the first to combine learning and collaboration.

At the same time, Piloto is what Samsung calls "artificial intelligence solutions to help children develop the right habits of smartphone use." The aim is to teach children "self-regulation skills" on smart devices to help them make the right choices. Finally, Innovision is "an eye care system in everyday life, with a nursery phone that can capture suspicious symptoms of strabismus and monitor the development of the baby's visual abilities." This seems like a clever idea, as babies naturally gaze at the phone.

In addition to the in-house incubator, Samsung's C-Lab supports nine startups outside of it, including an AI-based pet biometric solution called Petnow. All of these projects will be showcased at CES 2022 with their own booth. So far, Samsung still seems to be planning to participate in the event and has not canceled in the footsteps of other exhibitors (Google, Lenovo, Intel, Amazon, Meta, T-Mobile).

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