Among the phones, televisions and other devices expected to be shown by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week are a number of devices from the company’s Creative Lab.

The list includes a more mundane hand-motion control device for virtual reality headsets, mundane at least in comparison to the other two: a smart belt and, perhaps more remarkably again, a device that allows users to listen to calls from their finger without anything attached to their hand … and yes, we’re not making that up.

Here’s the list of Creative Lab devices Samsung is showing at CES.

WELT smart belt

A wearable fitness tracker around your waist?

That’s the premise behind the WELT, described by Samsung as a “smart wearable healthcare belt” that delivers smart sensor technology to monitor the health of the user wearing it (see image above).

Features of the WELT include the ability to record the wearer’s waist size, eating habits and the number of steps taken in a given day, like your regular fitness band tracker, along with time spent sitting down.

Data from the device, a la your regular fitness tracker, is then sent to a specially designed app for analysis and the production of a range of personalized healthcare and weight management plans.

RATING: It’s actually a great idea for those who don’t like fitness tracking bands but wear a belt to work every day; after all, you’re hardly going to forget to put a belt on each morning.

rink: hand-motion controller for virtual reality headsets

The more mundane of the three, the rink none the less is an interesting offering in that it delivers, in Samsung’s words, a more intuitive and nuanced way to interact with the virtual world.

“The ability to intuitively control the game or content just by using their hands provides consumers with a much deeper level of mobile VR immersion,” the company says.

RATING: If this works with devices from other VR headset manufacturers, it has the potential to be at least fairly successful, presuming other devices makers don’t build something that does the same thing.

TipTalk: Listen to phone calls through your fingertip

If smartwatches were straight from the pages of a Dick Tracy comic, TipTalk is something out of this world.

The device is described by Samsung as a new user experience (UX) that enables people to listen to the sound from their smart devices without headsets or earphones, simply by touching their finger to their ear.

You read that right: Put your finger to your ear to listen to a phone call or even music from your smartphone or smartwatch.

The device is shaped like a watch strap and is added to watches, both smart or analog, then is synced to smartphones to use. Samsung doesn’t explain exactly how the audio then travels, but presumably it somehow travels from the wrist to the finger, and then into your ear, presumably with your finger not working as a speaker but through the transmission of audio sound waves through the hand into the frontal ear lobe.

TipTalk is said to enhance the clarity of calls, enabling them to be taken in public, even in noise-sensitive or loud environments, such as a concert hall or building site – without the risk of being overheard.

RATING: This is the stuff of science fiction come to life. And if it works as advertised, it may progress from an early status of novelty to something that is a must have for those who take a lot of calls.

The risk for Samsung, as with the VR hand controllers, is that other companies will copy the technology and simply build it into future smartwatches.

Image credits: Samsung.