Just about every large tech company has an incubator inside somewhere, where researchers do strange and sometimes wacky things in the hopes that they’ll turn into money. Samsung’s research lab is called C-Lab and it’s where things like… well, like this are born.

Ahead of CES this year, Samsung has revealed which of its C-Lab projects are getting to meet the outside world. The presentation is divided between C-Lab and C-Lab Outside efforts and the difference between the two should be pretty obvious. The first consists of internally-created Samsung projects while the second are startups that Samsung is funding.

C-Lab 2021

No, it’s not an Adult Swim cartoon (but Sealab 2021 totally is) but some of Samsung’s ideas really are a little strange. The first, an app called EZCal, is rather a neat idea — this is an app that’s designed to let you optimise your Samsung TV set quickly and easily. Much cheaper than paying an expert to get your levels just right, too.

But there are other projects from the company, including Air Pocket — which is a portable oxygen storage device. Because 2020 happened and it hasn’t gone away just because we’ve moved on it the next year, of course. Samsung’s two other projects, Scan&Dive and Food&Sommelier are devices for “…fabric classification and optimal care recommendation” and “…finding optimal food & wine pairing” respectively.

Looking outside for answers

Elsewhere, the company is funding a diverse set of ideas. There’s a device called kiko, from a company called Magpie Tech, which is used to tell how fast your kids are growing — because using a doorframe is sooooo 1986.

There are another sixteen devices from the company’s C-Labs Outside venture appearing at CES this year. These range from a healthy tea recommendation service called Medipresso all the way up to small-scale cosmetics production and an… online K-Pop training service? Okay, sure. It makes about as much sense as anything else we’ve seen in the last twelve months.

CES proper kicks off from 11 January this year. We will, of course, be keeping an eye on all the tech announcements from the (now virtual) event.