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Transparent Displays Are Here, But They're Pretty Useless
An anonymous reader writes: Samsung has debuted the first commercial installation of its 55-inch 'mirror' displays at a salon in South Korea with a transparent OLED screen overlaid over a mirrored surface to allow interaction. The Samsung product rivals an equivalent TOLED from Planar, with both intended for high-end use in the retail display and exhibition space. However both manufacturers are struggling to find practical applications for the much-awaited technology. Transparent displays have been a staple of sci-fi films such as Minority Report for decades, but only, it seems, because they helped to open up scenes which would otherwise have been difficult to film. With the pending advent of AR-based visualization, the innovation of the clear monitor seems not only to have come too late, but also offer limited practical use, even if its current breathtaking prices were to descend to the consumer space.
WIndshields? If you can convince regulators that it wouldn't impact visibility, maybe...
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is not news.
Anyone with half a brain could tell you that transparent displays are useless except for some very small niche corner cases.
Until you're checking your ass flab for zits in the mirror and accidentally accept a call from your grandmother.
Really the place this will be useful is where we already have clear glass surfaces: windows, windshields, goggles, etc. But the main purpose there will be for AR or simple notifications. Standing at the window and having updates about what you are seeing or random data that somehow applies. Windshields and HUDs seems obvious. 'Smart' Goggles that give you useful info while working on whatever (chemicals, temperatures, electricity, etc). Or for that extra modern look, a TV that you hang on the wall and is clear while off or displays the art on the wall, but then turns on and 'replaces' the wall/art/etc with whatever you want to watch.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Then we can all have monitors that fade from view and let us see the office through the screen.
While your idea is good, why would I want to see those assholes? They should make a screen that blocks all peripheral view besides the monitor.
A HUD would actually help enhance visibility by tracking road markings, signs, and obstacles that are low visibility, as well as alerting you of events happening in your blind spots. Integrating 3D maps and directions would be handy. Putting your speedometer and other dashboard information closer to your view could reduce time you take your eyes off the road.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
London: transform any day into a bright sunny summer day. downside: more pub brawls ensue after complicated arguments and tense standoffs arise from disagreements about blustery and sunny.
Canada: images of alberta in february could be replaced by video of the leafs Borje Salming waxing your car which you tacitly know damn well has been under 7 feet of snow since october.
America: imagine a mcdonalds window that makes the food appear to have been cooked from ingredients that came from actual vegetables and known animals. Or a convenient window treatment that could some day make Dick Cheney look like a real person instead of a villain from an episode of captain planet.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I can see a lot of possible uses...
- easy HUD in cars : windshield but also on the external mirrors (augmented reality) for example... ...
- at supermarkets, on fridge doors
- on semi-transparent windows next to doors to show who is on the other side of the door while letting light get through when it's off
basically, on see-through windows for Augmented Reality, on windows (normal or semi-transparent) to let light though when device is off, on mirror or windows where if the device is off you need full mirror/window functionnality (like car mirrors), on glasses, ...
They should have linked "AR-based visualization"
Not everyone knows what Armadillo-Rhinoceros-based visualization is. It's pretty much zoo-centric terminology.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I saw these in Vegas last year. Not at a trade show, in shops being used for serving beer, so obviously the cost isn't atrocious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAbiQLkuQ0
And people have been doing smart mirrors for ages, and mirror display TVs. Not sure what the "new" hype is about.
A casino I visit has transparent displays over some slot machines. They've taken LCD diplays and removedance the back lights you can see the wheels through the animated images.
After we have noticed that software that looks great in movies but are completely and utterly shit if they were used in reality (like, say, databases that display EVERY SINGLE false photograph of a potential culprit before finding the correct one, or interfaces where you have to wave your hands about instead of typing on a keyboard), we now find out that hardware that looks great in movies is ALSO crap for real applications.
Who would have thought.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My final job plan is to setup an office were the employees are facing each other and the only input devices on each computer are voice controlled and a vertical transparent touch display.
After I take of picture of the office of the future I will retire and go down in history.
The problem is, you need to refocus. And while devices that project the image into a considerable distance do exist (they're employed on military airplanes), they are quite expensive and offer only a limited field of vision.
Ezekiel 23:20
Not so simple as transparent displays. I built a HUD for my car a few years ago, and proper optics are essential to the usefulness of a HUD. Essentially, you need lenses or curved mirrors or specially-tuned diffraction gratings to refocus the image some distance away - preferably many feet ahead of the car, so you don't need to refocus on the windshield.
Having information presented at the same depth distance as your windshield, but in the same general direction you're already looking for at-a-distance viewing, is distracting and hard for the eye/brain system to tolerate.
Here's a pretty good overview of HUD optics.
http://www.mikesflightdeck.com...
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
The problem is, you need to refocus.
You need to do that anyway if you're going to look at your dashboard or your satnav's display.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
First off, arcade games have been using these for years. Skip to 45 seconds in for an example (volume warning - it's in an arcade so it's loud): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's another arcade game with little fish bowls that's also transparent. It's really cool just to look at.
Also, many years ago, around 20 or so, I took a calculator apart and removed the back-most layer of the LCD and... voila - it was transparent. This capability has existed for decades (in fact all LCD displays are transparent - it's only the more modern OLED where that hasn't been the case) but there have always been backlights or some other material placed behind them to make them contrast as much as possible.
Better known as 318230.
And for much the same reason -- videophone conversations work well in movies as they more closely resemble the "talking head" interactions the public is used to in films, but in the real world, people don't necessarily want someone else looking at their face while they talk.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Citations for any of this? I don't have one so what I'm saying is no more believable, but I do recall a study that showed HUDs were more of a hindrance than a help.
I don't have any citations, but I do have one car that has a HUD. In all honesty, I thought it would be a stupid gimmicky thing, but I wish every car I owned had one now. Granted, mine is fairly simple, but well designed. It displays a digital reading of speed as the largest item. There's a bar graph of the tach across the top, bar graph for fuel along the right side, oil pressure and turn signals. What I found surprising is that the road is not as far in my peripheral vision when I glance at the HUD vs. the instrument panel. Plus, for me at least, my eyes don't really need to refocus (or not as much) to see the speed on the HUD. The numbers are large enough for me to see them.
I saw something on /. a few months ago that mentioned that the amount of information on a HUD can become a big distraction after a certain point. So I can see how it would be a problem if turn by turn directions are up there and radio information, etc. I would think anytime you need to actually read words, or need to more than glance at something, it's going to be an issue.
Having flown with a HUD, I'd say that the current generation of "reflect off the windshield" is completely adequate for speedometer, tach and such. However, a transparent film is not a good answer for low visibility, as those need to be projected exactly over the real obstacle. That isn't possible with an OLED display unless you have the head tracking correct and figure out how to deal with the parallax between the eyeballs. There's a valid complaint that the image will be focused in the focal range instead of infinity, but moving it up will still be an improvement, as the hundred milliseconds of refocus time has to occur with a dashboard anyway.
"I told you to never call me on this wall! This is an unlisted wall!" - President Skroob
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The Planar display is OLED based and does not require a light source, as mentioned in the video at the link in the summary. Not sure about the Samsung display although I suspect the same is true based on the provided images, unless they put a light source behind the mirror.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Eh, those photos show more vivid light than the mirror receives, I doubt that is the case.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.