Samsung's latest campaign will turn off your TV sets

Do you have a TV around you? If it's on, just switch it off and gaze upon the black mirror. If you get an irrational feeling in your head, Samsung's new QLED TVs and its Ambient Mode might be something you need. The Ambient Mode allows the TV to blend with their surroundings.

While the feature isn't something way disruptive, you can't say the same for Samsung's marketing campaign for the feature. Over the period of next ten days, the company will turn off millions of TVs in the UK. This is just to make people realize that TVs are just "ugly black screens" when turned off.

If this sounds kinda silly to you, well, you are not alone. However, Samsung did try to elaborate on the approach: "Screens will buzz with static and interference before going blank and entirely silent, leaving viewers staring into the void - or searching for their remote controls - for five long seconds. The darkness ends with text emerging, which reads: "This is your TV screen ... most of the time; a void full of nothing." It then explains the virtues of Samsung QLED technology which has an 'ambient' mode meaning viewers need never see a blank screen again."

Samsung will shut the TVs in the middle of popular shows like Coronation Street and The Simpsons, and more than 200 spots will air across 18 channels just to ensure that people really get the idea. Though this doesn't sound like a great idea, how it actually fares out, remains to be seen.

Besides, Samsung seems to be exploring an uncharted territory with its new content-dependent somatosensory output. At least that's what the new patent filing suggests. Basically, the idea here is to develop a wearable that could simulate a wearer's somatic senses like pressure, wind, and temperature.

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Samsung plans to achieve this with a special device which appears to be a tablet. This device can generate ultrasonic frequency templates that are thought to activate somatosensory activity. The device will create those templates based on what content the user is engaging with. The templates will then be sent to an external wearable which looks like a pair of headphones. This will allow the wearer to feel whatever's happening in the content.