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I've seen these before. The interesting thing is that they are putting them on laptops.

It works by having 1 standard LCD monitors and one special LCD monitor, one on top of the other. The top one is designed so that the color white shows up as transparent. You need a video card capable of driving two monitors at once, and to take advantage of the effect, you will need software that knows how to display each image. The slight difference in distance between them can make for some interesting 3D displays because your can tell that it really is overlapping.

Mouse control is a little weird because you have to tell the computer your using top monitor or bottom monitor since they are more or less dual displays. Once software knows how to handle this hardware that could be fixed.

The projected use I saw was using Maya with your controls on the back monitor and your 3D rendered creation showing up on the "front" monitor, rendered in real time. That was a stand alone monitor, but I'm guessing it's the same technology.

There is a company that sells desktop LCD monitors for this right now. See http://www.deepvideo.com/

I got to play with a few such monitors at the Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) developer conference last week. Deep Video Imaging has a multilayer display, exactly as you described. Also, SeeReal has a truely stereo (one image per eye) monitor that works by tracking the user's eye position. The downside of the SeeReal monitor is the lack of support for more than one user at a time.

The display you're thinking of is a MultiLayerDisplay made by Deep Video Imaging.

The top layer is a mostly transparent LCD (not perfectly transparent, but close enough) and the bottom layer is a standard LCD with a powerful backlight. The effect is amazing!

I saw this display and a few others at SGI's developer conference last week -- gobs of really cool stereo 3D and psuedo-stereo 3D monitors. The coolest was one by SeeReal, a display that tracks the position of the user's eyes to provide a true stereo image without needing any special eyewear. The downside of most of the displays is that they're designed for one user only.

The manufacturers web site.

An article in the Electronic Engineering Times.

If you read the specifications page, there is a superscript above "Pixel Resoultion" which is a superscript "1".. At the bottom of the web page you will find a reference to this superscript saying "1 available resolution of 1024 x 768 XGA"