Transparent Screens on the Horizon?

mhesseltine writes "According to United Press, researchers in Japan are developing transparent transistors. This could bring about see-through screens like those in Minority Report. Also, I imagine would be better heads-up displays (HUDs) for vehicles, layered flat panel displays, and new methods of interfacing with information screens."

Comments

Augmented Reality

[jeroen94704]

Transparent displays would also be a significant advance for the field of Augmented Reality.

Transparent displays are already here

[Eight 01]

I went to the newly renovated Ocean World exhibit at the Museum of Natural History a few nights ago. Their information kiosks feature a two-layered display. It is quite striking.

The top layer shows information about the selected creature, while the bottom layer shows the "tree of life". Elements on both layers are selectable via touchscreen. The bottom screen is visible through the top screen - both through a window and more faintly through the content of the top screen.

Stacks

[JohnFluxx]

You could have several behind each other - build up a 3D display ;)

I don't know how close you could get one behind another, but even if there is say 1cm gap between each layer, you could still have cool effects.

Transparent screens already availible

[adzoox]

To me a better type of transparent screen, more like the one used in Minority Report already exists (by conventional means)

By embedding reflective but transprent phosphors and other chemicals/compounds into plexiglass or glass one can project images onto that glass with a normal projector.

I did this as an experiment just after Minority Report using a tiny xb31 HP projector and plexiglass. Gives a really neat effect - just need low light / dark room (also as in Minority report)

Although the layered screens i suppose couldn't be done this way.

Re:Transparent screens already availible

[hype7]

To me a better type of transparent screen, more like the one used in Minority Report already exists (by conventional means)

I love this "relate /. tech to movie" kind of thing. Whilst the movie itself sucked, Red Planet was full of cool future stuff; including some cool future uses for "transparent screens"; they folded one out and as it progressed across the body it overlaid bodily injuries. Another use was as a map; the screen overlaid directions and bearings, whilst still letting you see the terrain behind it. Very cool.

Nothing beats the mechanical dog out of that movie, though. That's what an AIBO should be like! :)

-- james

Videoconferencing

[justfred]

One application that could use this technology is videoconferencing - put the camera behind the monitor.

This is already possible with one-way mirrors reflecting the screen, but one-way transparent screens would make it easier.

Instead of having the camera at the top of the screen and looking back and forth, put it directly behind the middle of the screen, about 2/3 of the way up. Or have smart software that would track where the other person's eyes are and put the camera between their eyes so you could look directly at them.

I believe that this is a big factor in why videoconferencing always "feels strange" and perhaps part of why it hasn't caught on.

Re:Can't Wait!!!

[(54)T-Dub]

Well the military uses are profound. HUD's (Heads Up Display) are still fairly primitive and this will allow for very advanced ones.

For personal use, having your windshield as a display hooked up to infrared camera's would increase nightime driving safety. (i think cadillac already has a primitive system)

Also, the article state's that the technology can make LCD's a lot brighter.

This would also allow a user to have multiple screens overlapping one another, kind of like transparencies but much more powerfull.

Not only that, but...

[The Jonas]

...I imagine that these will not be low $$$ items. Therefore, if the internals are transparent how will any repairs be made to prevent against handing out a lot of money to replace a broken/malfunctioing one.

3D display...

[Kiriwas]

If these can be made into a grid (for display 2d images, can they be made into a matrix to display 3d? I think that would be very cool. to have what looks like a solid glass box sitting on a table and BAM! things just start to form inside. -AntonK

Re:3D display...

[kosibar]

Imagine the size of the video card and its heat sink and fans on that 3D monitor! A video card for a single array of pixels can be pretty impressive these days - now we're rendering a matrix of pixels.

Seems like resolution would have to be low for this to be introduced. If you take 1024x768 and make it, say 256 layers thick (since it seems that there would have to be spacing between each later) - that's 200 million pixels to manage! And the memory required for color depth! My goodness!

Seems like a good thing for the entertainment business to prototype, though. Shall we get the Futurliners going again, GM?

So, a couple of thoughts...

What about the angle of the 3D monitor? A modern LCD is pretty good, but you still lose some color and/or clarity at an angle. Now you're adding depth and possibly a gap between layers. Seems like you'll have to be perfectly straight on in order to see things right. And when you are, you are looking down at some pixels (when you look at the bottom of the screen). How will the depth/gap be handled there?

For the car application... what about sun light? My LCD monitor on my notebook is useless in the sun. Now we make them transparent and put them on a windshield?

Can we handle some color depth issues with "overprinting"? If our color depth were only two, for the sake of the example, maybe yellow and blue, could we get green by displaying yellow on one layer and blue on the next layer?

I guess we won't see these for a while! I want to see a demo/prototype on a Futurliner, though. :-)

They're closer than you think

[Anonymous Coward]

They're closer than you think - Universal Display Corporation (http://www.universaldisplay.com) already has some prototypes and a May 20 press release says Samsung has built a transparent full color display using the technology (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030520/205446_1.html).

Most interesting is Universal Display's stacked OLED technology. It stacks the red, green and blue pixels on top of each other so one full-color pixel occupies the screen real estate of a single pixel.

Yep, it does exist

[green pizza]

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.

Increased color resolution

[thehun101]

This would make it possible to stack the RGB pixels on top of each other making it possible to display any color with a single pixel. Would that make the resolution of my laptop three times greater?

-the Hun

Already exists!

[green pizza]

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.

Hitachi already makes these

[deanj]

Hitachi makes these already:

Look through this

There's a show going in Baltimore this week that has other vendors of this sort of technology too.

Transparent Screens?

[dgallina]

To each their own, but I for one don't especially want this. I *like* my flat-panel where I can seeit (and not behind it). :-)

Re:Can't Wait!!!

[wfmcwalter]

The light and mirrors solution is, from a safety perspective, greatly superior to a transparent screen. Existing projection-reflected-from-windshield systems use lenses to project the image focussed at infinity. That way a driver (whose eyes are already focussed at infinity when looking at the road ahead) doesn't have to pull focus in to 1m to read the HUD and then push focus back out to infinity to safely read the road ahead. Most of the time spent looking at your speedo on a normal car is the focus shift time, rather than the eye-movement time, so a projected HUD like the GM one you describe is the best solution. The HUD reticles used by military pilots also use projectors, and similarly project the pitch-ladder and other indicators at infinity, so they appear to float spectrally "out there" in front of the aircraft.

For regular computer display purposes, a transparent screen doesn't seem terribly useful, due to contrast and "visual noise" interference from whatever is behind the screen (mitigated a bit if the screen is frosted).

Still, there's plenty of possible applications for this:

• Advertising displays (bus shelters, hoardings, etc.)
• Programmable windows (push a button for tinted, another for clear, etc.)
• Perhaps active military camouflage
• Layer a bunch of these in a big sandwich and you've got a decent 2.5D display

Re:Imagine the possibilities...

[vsprintf]

If your peripheral vision is so bad that you have to look down to see your speedometer, you shouldn't really be driving anyway.

Hmm. If you can focus a mile ahead in full sunlight, and still read a shaded speedometer with two scales (MPH and KPH) and all the other gauges, YOU 'DA MAN!! Keep eating those carrots, 'cause they're evidently working.

HUDs, I think not.

[mohaine]

I imagine would be better heads-up displays (HUDs) for vehicles

Normally HUDs have the requirement of 'Focus as Infinity'. This allows you to read them without refocusing your eyes. A flat LCD wouldn't achive this.

As a side effect of of the infitity focus, the size of a displayed image on a HUD doesn't descrease as you get farther away, only the viewable area gets smaller. It is pretty neat to be able to read the small letters on a HUD from across a room, even if you have to read them one at a time.