Acer Predator’s Project Dualplay is the weirdest thing I’ve seen at IFA 2024 so far

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: tech trade shows like IFA shouldn’t just be places for brands to promote things that they’re going to be selling in the very near future – it should be a playground where the weirdest minds in their R&D departments get let off the leash and show off the Frankensteinian monsters they’ve been cooking up behind the scenes.

Admittedly, Acer’s Project Dualplay is a relatively safe invention when judged by those standards, but it’s still the most interesting thing that I’ve seen at IFA 2024 so far, and is therefore worth celebrating.

The reveal started with the presenters waxing lyrical about the age-old struggle between the two disparate camps of PC gamers: those who use controllers and those who play correctly. I mean with a mouse and a keyboard. The question was then posited, what if a machine could offer both simultaneously? Could it finally end this ancient blood feud?

Thus was unveiled Project Dualplay, which at first glance didn’t look much different to any number of other gaming laptops, with RGB lights around the rim, plenty of angular shapes and a full complement of attractively designed mechanical keys.

Beneath them, however, is where the action is. When the presenter pushed down on the wide trackpad, it promptly popped out of the laptop. Flipping it over revealed a fully armed and operational gaming controller, complete with joysticks, D-pad and action buttons. As an added bonus, two small, vertically firing speakers popped out of the laptop’s edges, as well, just to add to the experience.

Once detached, the controller can further be disassembled by removing the sides that house the joysticks and buttons – much in the same way that the Joy-Cons detach from a Nintendo Switch.

Now at this point, I was thinking that this all seemed like a lot of work – and presumably, if it ever actually did come to market, it would be considerably more expensive than simply forking out £50 on an Xbox controller to go with your laptop. But this is just a concept and, like the transparent laptop or the bendable phone you can wear on your wrist that I saw at MWC earlier this year, it’s extremely unlikely that this particular little piggy will ever make its way to market. Not in this form anyway.

So it’s unfortunately unlikely that this will be the grand conclusion to the bitter saga of controller vs keyboard and mouse. Anyone who hopes to be able to do both with their laptop will have to stick with the tried and true method of just buying a separate Bluetooth controller. For the foreseeable future, at least.

Does that make proof of concept ideas like Project Dualplay redundant? Maybe a little. But in a year in which everybody (Acer included) is pushing AI features as the major innovations, this feels refreshing.

Plus, manufacturers are going to mess around with things like this regardless, on their way to developing the products that you actually can buy – so if given the choice between seeing some weird, pseudo-sci-fi tech or hearing about yet another way in which AI is further bleeding into your daily life, which would you prefer? I know where I land.