Samsung's latest C-Lab projects include a smart guitar with LED guides

As it does every year around this time, Samsung has unveiled its C-Lab incubator projects for CES 2022, with the aim to gauge customer response and further advance the most promising ideas. The star of the show this year is ZamStar, a guitar and app combo designed to make collaboration and learning easier. Other notable projects include an AI solution to help kids develop good smartphone habits and a nursery mobile that can allow for early detection of infant strabismus (eye crossing). 

ZamStar consists of an app and a custom guitar called ZamString. The idea is that you can play a part on the guitar, add effects and then sync it up with other musicians around the world. It's clearly a riff on the COVID-19 TikTok trend of musical collaborations (remember all those sea shanties early this year), with the idea of making it easy to sync up your music. Meanwhile, the ZamString guitar has a fretboard that lights via input from a song, making it easy to figure out where to put your fingers. It's not a new concept, but perhaps the first to marry both the learning and collaboration aspects. 

Piloto, meanwhile, is what Samsung calls an "AI solution that helps children develop proper smartphone usage habits." The aim is to teach kids "self-regulation skills" on smart devices to help them make good choices. Finally, Innovision is "a daily life eye-care system with a nursery mobile to catch suspicious symptoms of the strabismus and monitor visual ability development status for babies." That seems like a smart idea, since babies gaze natural towards mobiles.

Along with its inside incubators, Samsung's C-Lab Outside is backing nine startups, including an AI-based biometric recognition solution for pets called Petnow. All of these projects will be on display with their own booths at CES 2022. So far, Samsung still appears to be planning to attend the event and has not followed the lead of other exhibitors (Google, Lenovo, Intel, Amazon, Meta, T-Mobile) by cancelling.

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