2024 planned release date —

Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety

Displace TV slowly (and loudly) lowers self down to foam feet before lying flat.

Scharon Harding - 10/5/2023, 8:09 PM

Wall-mounting a big-screen TV can be stressful. You typically need to bore holes in your wall, making precise measurements and location selection critical. And when it comes to stability, you either have to bet on your own skills or have a handier person enter your home (and, possibly, pay them). The upcoming Displace TV seeks to address these concerns with a nail-less, hole-less mounting system that allows the 55-inch screen to zip line down to foam-padded safety if mount security is jeopardized.

Displace, a startup founded in 2022, announced the Displace TV at the CES 2023 trade show in January. The TV is 4K OLED and wireless, meaning it has no power cord or ports. Similar to LG's OLED M TVs, it gets its content from what Displace calls a "base control unit" computer placed near the television.

This week, Displace demoed new "safety features" for the TV made in response to concerns about the device's proprietary "active-loop vacuum technology." The vacuum tech is supposed to securely adhere the TV to painted, ceramic, or glass walls without holes, nails, or other tools. But it relies on TV battery power.

In an announcement Tuesday, Displace said it added "wall-sensing algorithms," four adhesives for stability, and a zip line-based "self-lowering landing gear system" to the TV.

Zip lining to safety

That's right, the TV will now come with integrated landing gear to ease concerns about its vacuum suction-mounting technique failing and sending 20 pounds of OLED TV crashing to its doom.

Displace demoed the new features on Tuesday at a press event in San Francisco with the TV mounted to a ceramic tile wall, as reported by PCMag senior reporter Michael Kan. As you can see below in a video of the demo that Kan shared on YouTube, once the TV sensed a disruption in the mount—specifically, a hammer banging the wall the TV's attached to—it started detaching from the wall and slowly zip lining down to the floor.

Advertisement

You can see the TV deploying foam feet from its underside before initiating a repeating, strident noise and hoisting itself down at, a Displace spokesperson told me, an approximately 10-degree angle from the wall.

Based on Kan's video, the TV lowers itself with the left-bottom corner going down first. Once the foam feet touch the floor, the panel starts angling its face down slowly, so that it's eventually lying face-down on the ground.

The demo looks like it took about two and a half minutes. All the while, a light flashed blue and red on the TV's top edge to accompany the alarming noise. Once the TV landed, it turned itself off.

Another video by Kan shows how a user could reinsert the zip line into the TV and quickly remount the TV without the adhesive tape. Displace will sell replacement adhesive tape packages, too, Kan noted, in case you want the TV to be able to dismount itself again.

Displace claims the TV can lower itself from as high as 10 feet, using the four adhesives as anchors. The safety features can also activate in response to other types of damage, like cracks in the wall or peeling paint, Displace claims.

Its announcement said:

Sensors within Displace TVs constantly measure the battery level and pressure in the vacuum, analyze the wall's surface, and check leakage on the vacuum pumps. If the vacuum pumps are in danger of not maintaining a seal or there is an issue with the stability of the wall, the TV automatically deploys four quick adhesives for stability. It then initiates a self-lowering landing gear system.

Of course, as the head of a company pushing TVs, Displace's CEO, Balaji Krishnan, claimed that "almost no one will ever need" the TV's safety deployment features.

"We've performed hundreds of hours of tests to ensure our wall-mounting technology is the safest on the market,” Krishnan said in a statement.