Project Precog is a concept PC formed of two shimmering sheets of glass. Asus showed it to us Tuesday morning at Computex in Taipei, and it’s an intriguing vision of future PCs.
And it’s a vision that appears to have legs: Marcel Campos, senior director of PC and phone marketing for Asus, said the company hopes to ship Project Precog in 2019. Until then, we’ll have to wonder what it will cost and what its exact features will be.
Dual displays are hot (again)
Precog taps into what could be a resurgence of the two-screen design trend that briefly took hold with initiatives like Project Taichi, a dual-screen device Asus showed at Computex in 2012. Precog is much larger, though, and looks more like a traditional convertible laptop that can rotate from a clamshell through tent mode and into a tablet.
Don’t expect that latter configuration to be especially popular. Though Asus didn’t reveal exact specs, each sheet of glass appears to be 4K resolution, and roughly—this is our guess—about a 14-inch display on each side. There are no obvious controls, and no keyboard. If you want to type on a Project Precog machine, you’ll need to use either a software keyboard, or connect an external keyboard. (In a series of demonstration models, the external keyboard used Bluetooth.)
Regardless of whether Precog comes to market, the dual-screen motif seems to be taking hold. Lenovo is expected to demonstrate a dual-screen device, and Asus has already shown another, with ScreenPad, which transforms the touchpad on the Asus ZenBook Pro 14 and 15 into a secondary screen. (ScreenPad is a full HD, 1080p display, Asus executives told us.)
Intel started it with Tiger Rapids
Asus is one of the companies that drew inspiration from a pair of concept PCs from Intel: Tiger Rapids, which paired an EPD display with a traditional LCD, and an unnamed second device, which closely mimicked Project Precog.
Will Precog pan out, or remain just a fascinating concept? Guess we’ll have to wait until next year to find out.