Lenovo's concept laptop is real, transparent, and ready to impress
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So it's literally, admittedly, and unashamedly a 'solution looking for a problem'.
Baffling. (But I'm not saying Lenovo-unique, or even perhaps that rare.)
The transparency is just a cool show piece that happens when you don't package the panel with a frame and an opaque backdrop. What they did spend time and money on is giving some of their marketing people a presumably small budget to show that useless but cool thing r&d stumbled across to the public. It would be stupid not to.
You have to remember that every company develops wacky stuff like this all the time to test out new concept tech, we just rarely see it as the consumers. This is the step before the money for R&D is spent to make it an actual consumer product, think like a concept car. People’s comments on this can cause tech from this concept to make it into other actual products for market.
I applaud this sort of behavior from hardware OEMs, nothing is lost and a lot gained.
What I do wonder, with microLED being as transparent as they are before you add a backdrop layer, is how much of its (daytime) energy consumption could be supplied by making the backdrop photovoltaic. If you only light up a tiny battery percentage number on a 17" screen, chances are it could run energy-positive forever, but if you do the same black-on-white the very battery consumption would likely be near-indistinguishable from a simple black backdrop. How many pixels at break-even? This could be a revolution for outdoor devices that still use transflective displays that are either low-resolution or low-contrast.
(I do suspect that resolution would be a limitation with microLED-on-photovoltaic as well, aiming that transparency is inversely proportional to resolution at a given manufacturing process)
It's a decent proof-of-concept of the technology, sure, but why make a full laptop out of it?
The glass keyboard is simply a terrible idea, until we invent a way to simulate the shape of a key, not just the tactile feedback when pressed. I've always wondered whether simulating the tactile presence of an object is in any way possible... Something like the magnetic repulsion effect, but needs to work on bare fingertips
If Lenovo made a smart mirror out of this technology (which in my opinion seems to be the most usefull), or a small SF like control panel for meeting room at companies, people would react less.
As far as I know those already exist for a few years.
Smart mirrors are a super DIY gadget to do at home. I never done one because I would not use it, but it's a good way to refurbish a laptop display.
I could see it being useful in an Augmented Reality context, perhaps as an overlay for an existing physical interface .. maybe this prototype has some issues that would make that unwieldy, but in general the whole concept of transparent displays has some validity.
Synthesizer guys could use it to restore their patches on old analog gear with no patch memory (okay you can just use your phone for this too..) .. aquarium users might use it to analyze their fish health, and so on.
Definitely some uses cases..
I think they made a laptop with it because it's something that many of us have scene in sci fi tv shows and movies.
What would you have made with it?
Why not put a grayscale LCD panel behind the MicroLED screen to allow the display to be locally opaque? Control it with an alpha channel for the whole display. Then you could have windows or objects appearing to float in space, with full dynamic range available.
Struggling to figure out who the target audience for this laptop is.
Also more secure, since only people you’d be sharing with have access to the content.
Great news! This is a concept laptop, meant to show off a particular "innovative" thing, not be a purchasable item for consumers. So no need to have a target audience, stuff like that is done just because, to have something "cool" to show off and maybe gather reactions/input.
Basically the same concept as "Concept Cars" but for laptops, I suppose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_car
> Like its rollable laptop from last year, Lenovo isn’t pretending that it has any plans to release its ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop as a consumer device. But Butler says he has “very high confidence” that its technologies will make it into a real laptop in the next five years and hopes that revealing this proof of concept will start a public conversation about what it could be useful for, setting a target for Lenovo to work toward.
A composite screen might have the opportunity for a much better HUD experience.
By stacking a bunch of these transparent panels on top of each other, you could display 3D objects without needing 3D glasses:
----o----- Layer1
---o-o---- Layer2
---o-o---- Layer3
----o----- Layer4
(etc)
Pretty sure there's an existing crowd trying something like this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EA2FQXs4dw
They're taking a different approach, though using a stack of panels too.
---
That crowd is still around: https://checkout.lookingglassfactory.com/collections/display...
It was an interesting novelty and fun to use the "transparent screen" for a few minutes. I think it was an option on the ThinkPad 755CD?
But in this case... a Lenovo (née IBM) laptop that is real and transparent is 29 years old and was on the market for years. Admittedly, the Lenovo concept laptop looks a bit brighter and appears to be illuminated.
But this isn't a remotely novel idea.
Maybe integration with a smaller screen like a phone is the way forward with electronic keyboards?
What is the benefit of this screen anyway? It seems to sacrifice the image quality of the thing you want to focus on: what's on your laptop display for the ability to see something you're usually trying to ignore: whatever is behind your laptop.
Let's hope it never comes to that.
Artist tracing through it? Make a transparent pen tablet, not the screen.
Even the most ferverent of artists will be spending more time doing other things than actually tracing.
If the pixels were solid, and ideally variable transparency, rather than just semi-transparent, the panel itself would have a number of applications.
Or just use some camera to make a picture, then trace in the painting app?
I just don't get this.
Of course it's a concept, so maybe the idea is just to explore possibilities. But this seems like slavish imitation of sci-fi without thinking things through.
If you stuck this in a windshield you wouldn't be able to focus on the display and traffic at the same time and it would likely be fairly headache inducing.
It wouldn't. But I'd love to see some management types at publicly traded companies use this in public places. Film it, mirror it, do stuff with your trading account.