According to [Kelsey], transparent displays are guaranteed to make “everything feel like the future.” Unfortunately they’re hard to find, and the ones typically available are OLED and can’t make solid black colors. But as luck would have it, it’s possible to repurpose a common LCD to be sort of transparent.
A LCD uses nematic crystals that can polarize light, with the amount of polarization changing based on the electric field applied to the crystal. Light enters the front of the panel through a polarizing film, passes through the display, and then bounces off a reflective back coating. The display itself usually polarizes light in a way that matches the front polarizer. That means if you do nothing you get reflected light. However, if a part of the LCD gets an electric field, it will repolarize in such a way as to block the reflected light making the display look black in that area.
[Kelsey’s] trick is to peel off the reflector and replace it with polarizing film taken from another display. The new polarizer needs to be bigger than the display for one reason: you need to match the polarizing angle of the front film with the new back film. That means if the new film is exactly the right size, it won’t be able to rotate without leaving gaps. By starting with a larger piece, you’ll be able to rotate for maximum transparency before you stick it on.
We’ve seen some homemade transparent numeric displays. The transparent wood, though, has usually left something to be desired.
I’ve got a desk clock that came this way stock, have to keep white or shiny things sitting behind it to be able to read the damn thing.
Still cherish my ABX-20.
I had similar clock. Wasn’t terribly usefull as clock, but i’ve found out it can be used as polarizing filter. If i looked through it at my laptop screen and rotated it, i could make the screen turn black.
I want this to be a heads up terminal for my sunglasses.
You’d have to be extremely myopic to read it.
Most LCD screens can have this done, there are even commercial products that can do this, including a PC case. Also if you just need 7 segment then you can just search transparent LCD on your favorite supplier and get clocks that work well and can be repurposed.
This right here. Take an edgelit lcd apart and you can pull off the light distribution layer. Unlike transflective panels they’re usually not bonded.
Smartglass can’t come soon enough.
Thought: In an AR contact-lens enabled world everything would be “futuristic”.
Right because you could have the smarts detect when text became visible and replace it with MICR E-13B imitation Westminster font, like everything was SUPPOSED to use in the 21st Century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_(typeface)
I prefer the 2001 future where everything is Microgramma.
Google Lens, English to English autotranslate. :)
You won’t be able to read the contact lens as it is right up against your eyeball even when you are ultra short sighted.
What if you had the image formed by lasers around the edge, and it bounced back and forth 300 times in decreasing concentric circles, internally reflected inside the lens, like a highly compact catadioptric telescope, and came into focus floating a foot in front of your face.
I suppose the lens could draw the image in focus on the retina itself.
All that, thin enough and yet for light to pass in from the front without altering the light passing from the front too? Wonder what the processing power needed.
Much easier to have something injecting the signal to the optic nerve.
No problemo, we’ll just study the pinout and protocol https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1771639/ then 3D print a custom vampire tap….
“Much easier to have something injecting the signal to the optic nerve.”
Just slide a thin matrix of very small LEDs into the sclera behind the retina.
I don’t think you need the light by the time you get to that point, just tiny electrodes. I believe there were some experiments to that effect carried out on blind volunteers.
It’s “An LCD, not A LCD.
For the abbreviation it’s ”An” LCD but if you read it out it’s ”A” liquid crystal display.
nope, its a banana ;)
No. It’s a small off-duty Czechoslovakian traffic warden…
Since Czechoslovakia no longer exists, they have been off-duty for a loooonnng time!
B^)
Did this at ‘Uni to make a special display for some project or other.
Never did get the hang of adjusting polarization angle.
I don’t understand why you want a dim, hard to read, low contrast display in the first place. They make the with the back light and diffuser for a reason.
Depends entirely on your environment. Most backlit displays in full sunlight *suck*. Which is why I’ve seen laptop mods which convert the backlit LCD to a transparent one, which makes it awful in artificial light but surprisingly usable outdoors.
The old eeePCs had this feature from the Factory.
I remember that feature in other laptops, but it was marketed for allowing presentations on an overhead projector.
Most back-lit LCD’s are already transparent with easy(ish) to remove “light guides” and not glued on like the reflective backings. Before Lumenlab went defunct, there were several projects dedicated to the topic on their forums. Overhead projectors combined with stripped laptop LCD’s were once quite popular.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050209043554/http://lumenlab.com/
Every nerd had one in the 2000s.
My local liquor store has an upright cooler with the entire door being a LCD display that runs adds for a making-love-in-a-canoe quality beer that goes transparent when you approach so you can see the bottles inside. Funny thing is, the store keeps local brews inside, not the branded one. Still a pretty cool transparent display
They need to hijack the video driver and, support local brew instead appears.
Oooh, I can’t wait until your next trip to Vegas… We’ve got slot machines with transparent complex curved displays these days. Go where the money is, I guess. They are very cool, although nobody else ever seems to get so excited about them.
A see-through-display is the most useless display ever. Every Sci-Fi-Writer is not getting it. Think about News that are written on transparent foil instead of paper. Absolutely idiotic. The same goes to Displays where you can see the things you DON’T want to see, the things in the back, they disturb the things you WANT to see.
While the TV manufacturers try to get the deepest/best “black”, the Sci-Fi-Authors simply think its cool to “remove” the black. Stupids.
Yes, agreed!!!
Unfortunately it’s been going on a long time! Just of the top of my head I think the first time I saw a transparent “chalk board” it was in the sub on “30K Leagues Under The Sea”, back in the 1970s. Then the cop shows started doing it. When tablets became a thing, set designers decided transparent tablets would be the future!
About a year ago I had to change the LCD screen on my Lumix DMC-TZ5. Before I put the camera back together with the new display panel, I connected it up and discovered it was the same as a backlit laptop display, just very small. It worked OK if you held it up to the light, though the black areas were all see-through.
Most people generally have no idea how things work, so if you show them something a bit out of the ordinary, they go “Oh coll! Can we have some too.” Pah!
Oh for spellcheck!
“Just off the top of my head,”
“Oh cool! …….”
And again ….. Pah!
My car windshield should be augmented with single curved LCD monitor panel glued to the glass, so that I can play car racers while driving my 1.7D Opel.
Could one combine a transparent OLED with a transparent LCD, the OLED doing the RGB and the LCD the K, as in CMYK?
this would give the thing some contrast, as the article says, OLEDs lack a black component. Sure, the displays are not really transparent, and combining two of them would make the whole matter even worse, but I am sure the benefits would outweigh the trouble… lets try to make the displays more transparent and welcome the RGBK standard!
CrytalFontz…wow…haven’t seen that name for about 15 years.
Yes they were popular for temperature/load monitors back in the athlon/P4 wars.
A transparent LCD display would make it easy to make a simple LED projector to project text on a wall or ceiling.