After showing off its race car-inspired Eracing Simulator last year’s show, Razer is back a year later at CES 2021 with a new take on gaming chairs. Unlike the very specific Eracing Simulator, the new Project Brooklyn chair boasts a more conventional form factor, allowing it to seamlessly fit into your man cave for traditional PC gaming sessions.
Like much of what’s shown at CES, there’s no guarantee that Project Brooklyn will become a sellable product anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less of a cool idea.
Even though it is stylish and designed with ergonomics in mind, Project Brooklyn is not just a bucket seat-styled Herman Miller-type seat for gamers that resembles Razer’s current Ishkur gaming chair. While it can serve as a deskside chair for PC gaming, it comes with a clever trick that allows it to transform into an immersive gaming experience.
A rod on the rear side of the carbon fiber bucket seat can extend upwards, where additional rods can be extended. Once fully deployed, the rods form a halo ring around the top, which serves as a mount for up to a “60-inch full surround OLED display,” which company executives say delivers stunning visual detail and quality.
In effect, you’re getting a nice, curved screen that surrounds you for the most immersive game play outside of virtual reality and augmented reality glasses.
Unlike traditional monitor mounts that use multiple flat gaming displays or a larger curved screen, Project Brooklyn uses a rollable OLED panel, which provides for a bigger radius curvature to really place you in the middle of the on-screen action. The essential design itself is not unlike the Scorpion Cockpit (video embedded above), but it’s the rollable OLED panel that separates Razer’s prototype from existing gaming chairs.
With its foldout display system, Project Brooklyn is truly versatile enough to serve as a desk chair, a gaming chair, and an immersive reality gaming throne.
Inspiration for Project Brooklyn comes by way of emerging display technologies, like rollup OLED televisions and foldable screens that are emerging on smartphones like Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold 2.
In a similar manner, the armrests can extend to give you a surface to access gaming controllers, a mouse, and a keyboard, if you desire. Razer claims that the chair is designed with PC and console gaming in mind.
As another piece of the immersion puzzle, Project Brooklyn also uses Razer’s Hypersense haptic feedback system, already in use in products such as the Razer Nari Ultimate headset.
Though the design of the chair is elegant — it even comes with subtle RGB backlighting along the sides of the seat cushion — it’s still unclear if Razer intends on commercializing this chair. Given the prototype nature of the project, Razer similarly did not reveal any pricing details.
For comparison, last year’s Acer Predator Thronos retails for $14,000 and isn’t nearly as versatile as Project Brooklyn for everyday use.