#HTE

Tech Overkill: Knocking On a Refrigerator to Make It Temporarily Transparent

I keep telling myself: Drama is relative. If I experience a setback at work, that doesn’t compare to a coal miner’s bad day at work. When my car is giving me trouble, at least I have a car to give me trouble and I don’t have to hitchhike. And while I find health insurance dismayingly expensive, there are sick people in developing nations who would gladly devote the same percentage of their income to have access to a network of medical professionals.

The part I have to keep reminding myself of is that this goes the other way, too. Technology-loving folks with more disposable income than me also have their problems. One such problem is that, according to LG, for every 66 times the average family opens a refrigerator, they only retrieve items 34 of those times! Meaning there’s 32 times they open the refrigerator, letting all that cold air escape, and find the contents so dissatisfying that they don’t remove anything at all. What a waste!

“A window,” you think. “They could solve this by putting a window in the door.” Sure they could–but why not a 29-inch touch-enabled transparent LCD that only reveals the contents when you want it to, preserving an otherwise sleek look?

The LG InstaView ThinQ Refrigerator also has a built-in Bluetooth speaker and comes with Alexa. As for release date, the company only says “Coming Soon.”