A winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award, the 77W isn’t a television, but rather a versatile display that can alter itself based on need. For long, televisions have been just ugly black rectangles on walls when they’re switched off, making them rather unappealing to look at 90% of the time. LG’s attempted at solving this problem with their rollable TV, and even Samsung’s tried to address this with their Serif TVs as well as the ‘Ambient Mode’ on their QLED TVs that allowed the television to blend into the background. While the Ambient Mode was a fairly technical feature that required AI to be able to guess what the wall behind it looked like (and LG’s rollable display is just downright expensive), the folks at Skyworth have figured out a rather nifty way to turn the television into an ambient little decor-piece when not in use.
The 77W’s display unit sits on a stone-textured base, and comes with a wooden sleeve that can move up or down (as can the display itself). This allows the TV to assume 3 modes – a TV mode, a concealed mode, and a fireplace mode. The concealed mode allows the display to descend downwards into the wooden sleeve, hiding most of that black box behind a textured wooden panel… but the other two modes allow the 77W to truly shine… either as a high-definition television for watching news, videos, sports, and entertainment content, or as a fireplace that peeks from below the wooden panel, playing a looped high-definition video of burning logs and crackling flames.
What the 77W really does is turn the TV into less of an attention-commanding gadget and more into an ambient piece of technology that fits into homes – just like your smart speakers are designed to blend right into your interiors. The wood and stone aesthetic is relatively minimalist and works well with Scandinavian and Nordic-style of decor, and should really sit well around stone walls or wooden flooring. If you’ve got an inactive or faux fireplace in your apartment to begin with, putting the 77W TV right in front of it could really spruce your place up (and give you a reason to have your furniture facing the fireplace to begin with!)
The 77W Art Display Device is a winner of the Red Dot Design Concept Award for the year 2021.
Designers: Shenzhen Chuangwei-RGB Electronics (Skyworth)
