The days of limiting your office furniture splurges to ergonomic chairs might soon be coming to an end. A sheet of plywood spanning a pair of saw horses is just no longer the optimal place to plop down for a long day’s work. Desks are now being crammed full of useful tech, including their own operating systems and 24-inch OLED screens packed full of apps.
Bringing us another step closer to the inevitable future where everywhere we look is filled with screens, the Lumina Desk is a motorised standing workstation featuring a decent-sized 24-inch OLED embedded just below the desk’s surface. It’s completely invisible when not in use, and not as intrusive as an additional monitor on top of the desk may be.
At 24-inches in size, that OLED display is large enough to be used as a secondary display for a laptop or a PC, similar to the 12.6-inch touchscreen on the Ficihp keyboard we featured yesterday. But the desk’s built-in display isn’t designed for that. The desk actually runs its own operating system called Lumina OS, which powers a collection of integrated apps allowing users to display their Google Calendar, Twitter feeds, and even Slack conversations. The desk’s display is configured through an app compatible with both Windows and macOS machines, and the company will provide an SDK so custom apps can be created for it. However, unlike the Ficihp keyboard, it’s not a touchscreen, and just passively displays info through these apps. The idea is that you’d probably rather not have your coffee mugs and keyboards accidentally clicking something.
The workstation is designed to accommodate your other tech as well, with six powered USB-C sockets, six power outlets hidden inside a generous storage compartment that can be used to keep cables out of sight, and two wireless charging pads that are also hidden and integrated into the surface of the desk. It will even incorporate health-minded features, with timers keeping tabs on how long you’ve been sitting or standing, reminders to take breaks every so often, and the ability to schedule when the desk will transition from sitting to standing modes, which presumably can be quickly over-ridden if you find yourself trapped in a video call when it starts to happen.
The only remaining question about the Lumina desk is how much it’s going to cost. Official pre-orders aren’t available yet, although interested parties can sign up for notifications through Lumina’s website as it moves closer to production. That more or less implies that, like that Herman Miller chair you splurged on to help your back, the Lumina Desk is going to be a hefty investment. Even IKEA’s motorised standing desks are half a grand, so add a 24-inch OLED screen into the mix and you’ll probably be paying more for this desk than your smartphone or laptop.