Worst of CEATEC 2015: Laundry robot takes 10 minutes to fold a goddamn T-shirt

Japan’s annual CEATEC convention, held on the outskirts of Tokyo, is a great place to see technology that’s a few years in the making. From budding startups to the ubiquitous electronics giants, the event showcases emerging consumer and enterprise tech with aisle after aisle of gadgets that you can see, touch, and often even try for yourself.

As I perused aisle after aisle of robots, drones, audio and visual equipment, and smart home appliances, I was drawn to an enormous black display booth with a brand name I didn’t recognize: Seven Dreamers. Nestled between Mitsubishi Electric and Fujitsu, the whole area was brimming with onlookers holding smartphones above their heads and assembled media outlets with video cameras trained on the stage. It was, without a doubt, the most crowded booth of the show. I had to find out why.

On stage, a woman opened a closet door built into the back of the stage, revealing a washing machine. She pulled out a freshly-laundered T-shirt, approached a large rectangular cutout near the closet door, and placed the shirt in a small slot that appeared near the middle of it. Behind the wall, out of the public view, hid Laundroid – the world’s first (drumroll, please) laundry-folding robot. Over the next five or so minutes, Laundroid used image recognition sensors to determine that the garment inserted into the slot was indeed a plain white undershirt.

It then spent another roughly five minutes folding it. The entire process was shown on large projection screens above the stage, but there were two glaring issues: with the gadget itself completely hidden, the video could have been pre-recorded while a mere human folded the shirt backstage. Oh, and the entire process, in addition to behind behind a wall, was obscured by a mosaic – just like watching a censored Japanese porno. I think I saw two robotic arms stretching the shirt out, but they could have been anything.

#Laundroid allegedly folding a shirt behind a wall. Live video feed obscured by a porno mosaic #CEATEC2015 #Japan

A video posted by Jeff Quigley (@jtquigley) on Oct 13, 2015 at 6:58am PDT

Finally, after the most boring tech (non)demo I’ve ever seen, the wall’s mouth opened and spat out a white T-shirt that some huge hidden machine allegedly folded. Golf clap.

At a convention center full of gadgets begging to be seen and played with, it was the laundry-folding robot that required the utmost level of secrecy. And judging by the crowds, this approach somehow worked.

Seven Dreamers’ Laundroid is being jointly-developed by Panasonic and Daiwa House. Its website says – I’m not joking, I swear – that they’ve been working on it for 10 years. Despite its current iteration taking between five and 10 minutes to fold a single short-sleeved white T, Seven Dreamers claims that the device will be available to consumers in 2017. The company is also working on an industrial version for nursing care facilities, slated for release in 2018, and an “all-in-one” washing/drying/folding model that will be built directly into closets in 2019.