The Issue:

Vertical orientation is the standard for short-form videos, which are optimized for viewing on (tall) cell phone screens.

Unfortunately, desktop monitors are wide, not tall. This means the full-screen vertical video experience is suboptimal: such a video only fills about a third of the display area (Figure 1).

Proposal:

A vertical video aficionado could fix this issue by manually rotating their desktop monitor by 90º, but this is probably asking too much commitment for a video that is typically barely a minute long.

Fortunately, there is a less labor-intensive way of handling this: we’ll just add a motor to the monitor so that it can rotate itself! Now the computer can simply automatically detect vertical video and send a signal to the newly-motorized monitor to rotate itself (Figure 2).

(By the way, the concept of a rotatable monitor isn’t new: a “Radius”-branded CRT monitor with this feature was sold in 1991: https://www.google.com/search?q=radius+pivot+crt+monitor. But you had to rotate it yourself, with your own two hands!)

(By the way, the concept of a rotatable monitor isn’t new: a “Radius”-branded CRT monitor with this feature was sold in 1991: https://www.google.com/search?q=radius+pivot+crt+monitor. But you had to rotate it yourself, with your own two hands!)

What about cats sleeping on monitors?

In the ancient CRT monitor era, cats liked to sleep on top of (warm) monitors. Fortunately, flat-screen monitors are already too narrow for a cat to sleep on, so we don’t have to worry about a motorized monitor spilling an angry cat onto the owner’s desk. So the hypothetical cat issue can be classified as SOLVED.

PROS: Brings the “cinematic experience” to vertically-shot video.

CONS: Adds a risk of knocking over coffee cups, desktop speakers, water bottles, and more during the auto-rotation process.

Originally published 2026-09-14.