Samsung's incubator will hatch a robot and other oddities at CES

Robots and windows and group chats, oh my!

What you need to know

• Samsung C-Labs Inside grows employee ideas, like an AR keyboard or a scanning highlighter pen.
• C-Labs Outside is a startup incubator for Korean technology and IT companies.
• The C-Labs booth will show off concept ideas from both Inside and Outside.

Samsung incubator group C-Lab will showcase product concepts from its fledglings startups at CES, including a home robot companion and an artificial sunlight lamp shaped like a window. C-Lab Inside is the company's internal employee incubator, and the company claims 40 startups have been formed with help from the program. C-Lab Outside is an incubator serving Korean startups. These won't be Samsung-branded products on display, just ideas from the incubator groups.

Among the more interesting C-Lab Inside projects, SelfieType will show an augmented reality keyboard that uses your selfie camera to create a virtual QWERTY on a surface in front of you. Hyler is a highlighter pen that highlights text on paper and scans the text digitally. Becon is a scalp-analysis tool, a piece of hardware you apparently hold to your head to get hair care recommendations. Samsung is not claiming it has found the cure for hair loss.

C-Lab Outside company Circulus will show off a companion robot, "piBo." The company says piBo will be able to interpret facial expressions to read user emotions, and it will offer the weather and news. More in keeping with Samsung's product line, there will also be an ultraviolet sensor to tell users when they have been outside too much. This is a feature that cropped up in Samsung devices occasionally in the past but was not well-publicized. Another startup will show off a group video chat that lets you use Samsung AR Emoji, and brags that it will start in a more discreet silent mode. If you're at CES, you can find C-Labs at the Sands Expo. You can see the full list of products on display on Samsung's site.

Philip Berne worked from 2011 to 2017 as part of Samsung's Public Relations team and maintains no business or financial relationships with Samsung nor is he currently bound by non-disclosure agreement.