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LG’s new ThinQ smart fridge has a transparent 29-inch touchscreen and runs webOS

LG’s new ThinQ smart fridge has a transparent 29-inch touchscreen and runs webOS

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At CES 2018, your fridge now runs webOS on a see-through screen

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Image: LG

Samsung has made fridges with touchscreens before. LG has made fridges with doors that turn transparent to show you the inside. This year at CES 2018, those two ideas are finally merging into one with LG’s new InstaView ThinQ smart refrigerator, which features a 29-inch touchscreen that becomes transparent if users knock on it twice.

LG actually tried this two years ago, with a version called the Smart InstaView Door-in-Door that ran a full version of Windows 10, but it’s not clear that the company ever shipped the Windows version.

This version uses the touchscreen to manage your food using LG’s webOS software and Amazon’s Alexa, which will let you tag food with virtual stickers and expiration dates and get automatic reminders when things are running low or about to go bad. There’s also a wide-angle panoramic camera on the inside of the fridge that will let you remotely view your fridge while you’re out and about to check and see if you’re actually out of milk or not.

Image: LG (YouTube)

Unfortunately, the only image that LG has shared showing the fridge is a low-resolution shot on its YouTube page banner, but it seems that you’ll be able to still use the screen while it’s translucent, allowing you to tag food directly in a vaguely augmented reality-esque move.

LG is also touting how all of its ThinQ kitchen gadgets can talk to each other to make kitchen tasks easier. So your ThinQ fridge can talk to your EasyClean oven, which will help you cook food through step-by-step instructions from the recipe app from your fridge. Then, your EasyClean oven can notify your QuadWash dishwasher about the kind of meal you cooked, so it can more efficiently select a wash cycle for that dish. Of course, all this requires spending thousands of dollars replacing every appliance in your kitchen (and if this all works as well as LG claims it does), but it’s still an intriguing vision of a Jetsons-like future utopia.

No price or release date for the InstaView ThinQ refrigerator or any of LG’s other new appliances have yet been announced.