Whether it’s Star Trek or Avatar, nothing screams “hey, look, you’re in the future” quite like large vertical display screens that are as clear as a sheet of glass, so you can see through ’em. And whether it’s Star Trek or Avatar, nothing makes as little sense as a display screen that’s transparent enough to see *other* things through. This is *not* the route to visual clarity, but rather an effective way to make important data illegible.
Fortunately, a transparent display screen is a fictional concept, so we don’t have to worry about idiot corporate interior decorators redesigning workspaces to include these ridiculous things. Right? Fictional? Not available? Well… crap.
Sci-Fi-like displays are now real
LG Display showed off some of its latest products Thursday, including a display that can be rolled up like a piece of paper and a transparent display that looks just like a window until it’s turned on.
That’s just stupid.
Sure, you could simply put a white sheet of paper behind it (or spraypaint the backside white), but the basic concept is so obviously flawed that you gotta wonder why they’re devoting much effort to it. Perhaps, with a proper opaque backing, the display has important advantages; fine, but if so, why play up the transparency aspect?
Now, one way this might work is if there are *two* transparent layers. One is the display… the other simply turns opaque. There is “smart glass” that will do that when charged up… or at least, becomes “frosted” with a charge. But if it can become truly opaque, then I can see boardrooms in skyscrapers that have big ass windows overlooking Neo Tokyo or the Manhattan Crater or the Mosque of Notre Dame employing this technology.
The other tech described in the article seems a lot more directly promising: paper-thin flexible displays. Imagine, a decade or so from now, if buying a TV meat going to WalMart and buying a TV like you would today buy a poster. Rolled up in a tube, you take it home and stick it to the wall with double-sided tape. Or have it roll up overhead for storage like an old-school movie screen or a map in a classroom.