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Comment by asah | Hacker News Reader

Everyone's asking "but why" ?

My 2c: you see transparent displays in movies (e.g. Minority Report) because they're cool but also for the Hollywood-practical reason that it allows the audience to see the body language and facial expressions of the user/protagonist.

IRL, you don't want everyone seeing your screen and don't want the visual distraction of seeing other peoples' screens. If you want to share, it's trivial to screenshare to their device, project on a wall, put two thin monitors back-to-back, etc.

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I believe there are plenty of applications once they are cheap enough, but none of the applications are TV or PC monitor.

Car windows, regular windows, glasses, store fronts, fridge doors in stores.

Ads. Sorry folks. :-/

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My wife and kids have educated me that skins in games are like dresses on Barbies and great fun. At great length my friends talk about motor cycle handholds, exhaust and other things I know nothing about. I liked the interior LED themes in recent Volvo’s. This all to say: de gustibus non disputandum. People will like what you (and I) abhor.

There are those that are good at inventing things. There are others that are good at figuring out the creative/practical way of using those things that deliver a product(s) that will have great success when combining several of these one off tools. There's a very valuable company with a fruit logo well known for this.

In fact, I'd imagine the original creator rarely makes as much money from the creation as those that figure out the practical ways of using it.

Also, some people just don't seem to have much imagination

If this means we can make television screens that aren’t a big black rectangle when switched off, but, say, look like a picture frame with a glass screen in front of it, I see a market.

Tiny ones could be useful in smart glasses, if we ever find good use for them.

Perhaps a stack of these could be useful as a volumetric display?

I wonder what tricks would be invented to make up to lack of enough layers

I've seen these used to great effect in museum displays, such as the Ramses exhibit that recently toured worldwide. In that show, they used transparent screens in combination with other displays, lighting effects, etc. to create something more captivating for today's audiences than just a flat presentation or an item in a glass box.

Youy know OLED's are transparent too right?

I was taking a phone apart and accidentally peeled the back painted copper layer off my OLED screen, and got a phone where I could see the insides of the phone while using it, through the screen. Screen fully worked, touch and everything afterwards.

It depends on execution, but I could see transparent screens being nice for a desk setup where privacy isn’t a concern. They could make for a cleaner, more open, less cluttered feel than could be had with traditional displays.

One could also more easily have arbitrary logical divisions of transparent screens. For instance one could set up a single transparent superultrawide screen to function as three separate displays if they wanted (useful for having multiple sets of virtual desktops) with transparency being used to create aesthetically pleasing divisions between each virtual screen (imagine each screen as a roundrect).

You don't have any interest in a TV that effectively disappears when it's off? You'd rather have a large, black monolith to look at?

A big empty stretch of wall space would be as awkward (or more) than a large black monolith in my opinion, but if the screen could switch off backlighting (but not color) in its pixels and basically turn into an unlit canvas that displays art when idle, that could be really cool.

Maybe you could hang a physical piece of art there like a painting, with the display embedded in the glass within the frame.

Easy to put a painting, pictures, etc behind the TV. Doesn't running the display, even without the backlight, take energy?

If you want to replace TV with something, put static image there? TVs are usually bolted to wall, so even if TV's transparent, you gotta look on the wall?

That requires energy.

I can only see very limited market uses like possibly store window displays or some theme park attraction. I don’t know how that can justify the R&D expense.

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