Through the looking glass: transparent OLED reaches beds, restaurants, subways

This story is part of CES, where our editors will present the latest news and the hottest gadgets from CES 2021 entirely virtual.

LG Display, the company that produces the OLED panels used in LG TVs, Sony, Vizio and others around the world, also demonstrates some of CES’s most interesting and futuristic technology concepts. Your private cabin is where I first my mind was confused by an 18-inch scrollable OLED in 2016, where I experienced the craziest yet 65 inch version two years later. It is also where I smelled OLED flowers and relaxed in a OLED-coated airplane dock.

With CES 2021 becoming fully virtual I won’t have the chance to try the stand in person, but the company’s online showroom is the second best option. His focus this year is on the new transparent OLED screens, which LGD has improved to provide 40% transparency, compared to 10% for current generations. Monitors you can see are not new – LGD praised them for a while in commercial applications and earlier this year Xiaomi started selling 55-inch transparent TV in China for $ 7,200 each. LGD, the only transparent OLED manufacturer in the world, supplies these panels, but as always, it is not talking about specific products for sale with their latest concepts.

The online showroom will demonstrate the following scenarios, each with a 55-inch transparent OLED screen.

• Smart bed: Press a button and the transparent OLED screen rises from a frame at the foot of the bed to display TV programs or other information. The screen itself acts as a speaker – a feature found on some current OLED TVs – and LG says the frame and its transparent screen can be moved to other areas of the house.
• Restaurant partition: Displayed as part of a sushi bar, the screen between customers and the chef can display menu or video items while people wait for their food, while still allowing viewers to see the chef working and maintaining the integrity of a partition.
• Subway train window: A window installed on a subway train can display route information, weather, news and maps at the same time as passengers look out.

LGD says demand for transparent screens is increasing in smart homes and buildings, as well as in driverless cars, aircraft and subways. Among the three scenarios of the 2021 virtual showroom, the “smart bed” seems the least useful to me, but it is easy to imagine a future in which these screens are so cheap and ubiquitous that videos or information can appear on any normally transparent surface. windows to glass coffee tables and glasses. It is not as mind-boggling as a roll-up TV, but it is arguably more practical.

An excellent thing about the virtual CES is that, for the first time, stands that were private can be made more widely available. LG Display claims that its online showroom will be open to all visitors during CES 2021.