LG Display continues its trend to reimagine the future of screens at CES 2021 with a new transparent TV. The panel is a 55-inch OLED, but its transparent design allows you to see through it even when it is turned on and displaying an image.
The screen achieves 40% transparency, says LG Display, which is an improvement over previous transparent LCDs that the company claims to have achieved only 10% transparency.
LG imagines the screen at the foot of the bed, from where it can partially or fully rise to show information or videos, while maintaining the view on the other side of the screen. The panel as designed now has built-in speakers in the form of LG Display’s Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO) technology, which uses screen vibrations to produce audio. It is the same audio system found in another LG OLED prototype announced at CES this year, a foldable game monitor that can turn from plane to curved.
LG says that the transparent OLED set can also be moved around the house if you want to position it elsewhere (if it’s something you can actually buy, which you can’t now).
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The company sees this as a smart home device that could one day be used in public environments, such as restaurants and public transportation.
“Transparent OLED is a technology that maximizes the benefits of OLED and can be used in many places in our daily lives, from stores, shopping malls and architectural interiors to autonomous vehicles, subway trains and aircraft,” Jong-sun Park, LG Vice senior president of Display and head of commercial business, said in a statement. “It will become a next-generation screen that can change the existing screen paradigm.”
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This is not the first transparent screen to make a debut at CES; we’ve seen Samsung’s transparent OLED screens before, and Panasonic showed a transparent screen prototype in 2016 (although it was only HD). And it’s not even LG’s first transparent OLED – the company announced last month that it has started developing transparent OLED sliding doors for office buildings and commercial spaces. LG also created a 77-inch curved transparent OLED in 2017 that it imagined could be used for signage or advertising.
But this is the first LG Display screen of its kind, made strictly like a TV that would go to someone’s home, and not just something you would see in a futuristic mall or some other commercial location.
This is just one of many in a long line of experimental LG Display prototypes, some of which actually become real products that you can buy. The company made waves in previous CES showcases with several iterations of its scrollable OLED technology, while a commercial version of the TV using the technology finally went on sale in South Korea in October last year for $ 87,000.
Unfortunately, there is no indication at the moment that LG’s new transparent OLED TV will become a real product at some point in the future or how much it will cost if it does.