When Razer comes out with a new prototype at CES, we sit up and listen.
(Image credit: Razer)
This year's CES event is nearly at an end, and we've heard lots of weird and wonderful tech announcements come out of it. But among the battery toasters and tea-cooling cat robots, there's new tech that looks useable, effective, and promises to solve real life problems.
Razer's heating and cooling gaming chair, named Project Arielle, is such a proposition. The 'problem' is that gamers can get uncomfortably hot while gaming for hours on end. Through a wider lens, all office workers can feel too warm or too cold during the year. Well this chair offers easy temperature regulation to its users, using some very impressive looking tech. If it delivers on ergonomics (which, based on the press images, it will), it just might be the newest addition to my list of the best office chairs for back pain.
(Image credit: Razer)
The Arielle chair has a fan at the base of it, which pumps cooled or warmed air through the frame of the upper chair and the seat. It's a simple idea that – by the look of the souped-up press images – is expertly done.
What's more, and just as important to me, is that the chair itself looks great! I hear 'gaming chair', and I prepare myself for the inevitable racing car-designed foundation with LED light flourishes. Well, project Arielle looks stylish and cool... and also familiar. That's because Razer have simply added its new temp tech onto their existing mesh gaming chair, the Razer Fujin Pro chair. I haven't tested the Razer Fujin Pro chair yet, but looking at reviews, it's highly regarded.
(Image credit: Razer)
Although a prototype, and currently with no official on sale date, you can request updates on the product from Razer's dedicated page. There's also the optimistic message, 'For a limited time, all order will enjoy free shipping to the US,' on their site, which makes me think that this chair is closer to a major release than not.
And it's not as if this chair is the stuff of a mad man's dream. There are already chairs out there – X-Chair's chairs for example – that offer heating, cooling and massage features (though admittedly, through more basic means).
In short: I'm excited to test and review Project Arielle... preferably in the depths of our next sweltering summer!
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Beren has worked on creative titles at Future Publishing for over 13 years. Cutting his teeth as Staff Writer on the digital art magazine ImagineFX, he moved on to edit several creative titles, and is currently the Ecommerce Editor on the most effective creative website in the world. When he's not testing and reviewing the best ergonomic office chairs, phones, laptops, TVs, monitors and various types of storage, he can be found finding and comparing the best deals on the tech that creatives value the most.
