Proof of Concept - See through OLED screen on a laptop | Hacker News Reader

Proof of Concept - See through OLED screen on a laptop

gizmodo.com

34 pointsanderzole27 comments

I can't stand the text of the story. Terrible. Likely supposed to be funny or grandiose but I'd happily trade that crap for some actual meaningful content. Perhaps start by telling us about the screen or the person who made it.

Cool. Do you set a color to transparent, such as black or white? Could you use the alpha channel to have uneven transparency?

This would be phenomenal for augmented reality applications.

It would be a little tricky though to track the eyes/head of the viewer to appropriately display the AR layer.

There's already cheap technology to do this using a Wii remote camera attached to the screen and a pair of IR LEDS mounted on your glasses.

Those low resolution IR cameras must have been produced in such huge quantities I bet they are pretty cheap now. You can buy a Wii-mote for $50 retail and that includes lots of expensive hardware you don't need such as a bluetooth transceiver and a pair of accelerometers.

Specifically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

Check out his entire youtube channel, it is full of interesting software/hardware hacks.

I mean without these "johnny chung lee wiimote goggles" :) It would be awesome doing the same using only webcam head-tracking.

Face trackers are pretty robust these days - the demo that comes with OpenCV is a great example, it just works without any configuration.

Build a 3d camera into the bezel?

If made transparent enough, and with the right finish, putting e-ink underneath in a tablet might make for the easy-on-the-eyes reading experience of e-ink with the full capabilities of a standard screen.

You'd probably have parallax trouble if you tried to use both displays concurrently. And unfortunately I suspect "transparent enough" would be quite difficult.

Alternatively, you could just put the e-ink on the "bottom" of the computer. No need to manufacture additional surfaces.

The real problem is making sure that the background to the screen doesn't obscure what you're seeing on the screen. I'm sure many can attest to having 'transparent' terminals that are screwed up because of a background that clashes in a bad way or the terminal ending up on top of a browser window that has a clashing color scheme making the content illegible.

For this to really be feasible for everyday tech, it would need to be married with something to detect these clashes and adjust opacity/colorschemes appropriately. Similar (in concept) to those eye glasses that darken/lighten with the amount of ambient/direct light (maybe just sunlight, I never had an actual pair of those glasses) that you encounter.

Update: This also says nothing of how this tech will react to direct sunlight. In direct sunlight, how will something like this compare to a tech like full color e-Ink (or even just black/white e-Ink)?

I imagine the production OLED will have a simple Liquid Crystal background which can become fully opaque to block out the environment.

This could be the same resolution as the OLED leading to some funky transparent pixels and some not.

Possibly also oscillating to create semi-transparency (and perhaps seizures :( )

Low tech solution to this would be to just darken the background. A lot of people use this in their semi-transparent terminals and it seems to work for them (addmitedly not ideal).

I'd be more worried about the front imagery obscuring what's in the background, in case people start putting this on car windshields or sunglasses (i'm speculating but hey, we're talking about future anyways).

The problem being that sometimes even semi-transparent terminal windows can be obscured if the background interferes with the text colors and/or terminal background. This might not be a problem if you put an outline around the characters though (i.e. like most subtitle renderers on media players do -- white text with a black outline so that you can still read the subtitle even when the actual video background is white/really bright).

I've wanted this ever since I watched Cowboy Bebop. Not sure how usable it'll be, but it's damn cool. Maybe it'll be used mostly for applications where coolness is the main thing, like advertising and art.

The really impressive thing about this technology is it's potential in every day 'windows' that we see every day. Example, heads up displays in car windows so that passengers can see information about their surrounding landscapes. That's just one idea but I'm sure you guys can think of more.

I was thinking of store window displays.

If the price is reasonable.

It's much cheaper currently to project onto a mesh film for close to the same effect.

Pfft, ancient technology: http://extension.ws/photos/see_thru_laptop_1200.jpg

Would love to know what applications are aside from the obvious:(1) aug reality, (2) huds, ...

Tracking spaceships? http://i.imgur.com/H55EO.jpg

(3) tracing, ...

I'd like this embedded in my eye glasses. I'd also like a pony.

Unfortunately IE12 still won't support transparency.

More of a "disproof of concept" . . .

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