This Lenovo AI laptop concept creepily follows you around the room with its ever-watchful screen
Are you the type to put Blu Tack over your webcam, for fear of someone getting access to it? If so, Lenovo's new AI PC concept probably isn't for you, as its central gimmick requires having a reading of your face at pretty much every moment.
As reported by Tom's Hardware, the Auto Twist AI PC is a new laptop concept that was shown off at IFA in Berlin just this week. It comes with a "Dual Degree of Freedom" hinge that allows the screen itself to spin around, while the webcam captures your face and tells it where to go. It can slide up and down, or left and right to look at your face as you walk away or get closer to the screen, although it does seem to encounter the odd hiccup.
For instance, the screen wobbles pretty substantially when readjusting, and flicks back and forth between two different people in front of it. With a built-in microphone, the laptop can respond to commands, like converting it to tablet mode or closing the laptop lid. However, the lid appears to have been caught on keys trying to move from laptop to tablet mode, and required a restart to get running again.
Despite my cynicism, I can understand the type of user that would actually get some use out of this. If you swap from a seated to a standing desk or can never quite get comfortable in your chair, the moving screen means not only being in the frame during meetings but also giving you a better viewing angle for casually streaming video.
As well as this, if you are someone who likes to pace around during meetings or wants to give a presentation with a whiteboard, this could mean you could effectively set up anywhere, and let your computer do the framing for you.
However, for someone like me, I don't think I'd ever get the use out of this, and would likely just turn that mode off. The webcam is also used to give "wellness enhancements", like fixing your posture as you use it with regular reminders. This concept is interesting but I don't know if many users would respond well to their laptop critiquing them.
Being a concept, we might never actually see this device hit wider production, and if it does, it should be in a more stable state. As Microsoft Copilot machines make their way into the world, signalling widespread adoption of AI, this concept is one of the strangest uses of it in PCs I've seen yet.