there's nothing in lg's demo room today
that i haven't seen before
on a show floor and a hotel suite well
i mean except for that but they won't
take the veil off that so i won't be
seeing that today
which means i'm not seeing anything new
today
so then you might be wondering well gee
linus why the heck did you fly all the
way to south korea to make this video
and the answer is that unlike
in a controlled show floor environment
today i get to go hands-on like
literally hands-on with a prototype
transparent oled from lg display
including
running my own content on it so if you
guys were thinking
there's no way he's gonna hook a pc up
to it and game on it
well you're clearly new to this channel
so they were a little cagey about how
much detail i can give you guys about
how it actually works
transparent oled is still very much a
developing technology
but one of the key benefits of getting
off the show floor
and into the factory is that i got a
chance to sit down with one of the
engineers
who actually worked on the prototype
display
that we will be playing with and between
mr suk
and the rest of the team here i was able
to gain a lot of insights
here's the thing transparent displays
are honestly
nothing new in fact if you have a fancy
pant store
and you're willing to pay the premium
you can already get them installed in
your windows
which allows you to have your you know
product display
and communicate a lot more information
about it than you would normally be able
to
too so the demo that they're running
here is
pretty typical of how they'd expect
transparent displays to be deployed
in the real world but the key difference
between a transparent oled and a
transparent lcd
is how clear they can make the portions
of the display
that are off and i actually can't tell
from back here
it's like it's trippy i can kind of see
like a ghost of the image from back here
i can't tell which parts you guys can
see through or not
so here's the thing lcds partly because
they have a separate backlight
have more layers that are required for
them to display an image
and they also require more circuitry to
drive them which
obviously gets in the way of light
passing through them
so at this time you could expect about
10
transparency out of an lcd display
by contrast oled only really requires
the oled pixel sheet which if you're
familiar with the technology
emits its own light and the circuitry
that connects all of the pixels together
so the thin film transistors
or tft none of the other optical sheets
are actually needed so when i asked mr
suk to tell me about
one challenge in creating a transparent
oled
he laughed and then his answer was
immediate he said one of the biggest
challenges in achieving this level of
transparency
was figuring out how to align the
circuitry that drives the
pixels behind the self-emissive pixels
that way you can make much better use of
the available space
for transparency so to better understand
then
how a transparent display works i asked
then well
what exactly is the difference between
the oled pixel sheet in the transparent
display
and then the one that would be in your
normal oled tv at home
and apparently it's pretty negligible
so my follow-up question of course then
was if i took my tv from home
you know off the wall and started
peeling layers off the back of it
could i make it transparent i mean if
you've ever tried this with an lcd
you'll know that it actually kind of
works that's how i buy power does those
trippy side panels
on some of their computers and the
answer was unfortunately
no to make it clear
pardon the pun it's not so much that
they leave
out the back opaque layer and it's more
like that they
punch thousands of holes through the
entire displace
now it's time for the fun stuff so i
ended up with one of the
heaviest bags that i have ever taken on
a trip
the thing about these kinds of like demo
grade displays
is you're never really sure what exactly
is behind the curtain
or under the cabinet you don't know you
know what it takes to drive them
so i came equipped with everything that
i could possibly think of
but i think given how straightforward
this one ended up being
honestly we could use either so we could
use our xbox one
or i actually brought a full-fledged
gaming pc equipped with a gtx
2080 ti tell you what why don't you guys
leave a comment below letting me know
which one you think i should use
i'm just kidding by the time i read your
comments i'll have made the decision
like ages ago so
we're gonna go with the gaming pc all
right so they actually pre-hooked us up
an hdmi cable that plugs into just sort
of this gray box here
all right so we can go ahead and hook up
to that also i think we can probably get
our
our jewelry display out what do you
think dennis does this suit me
dazzling thank you you know what i'm
going to wear it for the rest of the
video
yeah what do you think this is a good
look for me
you know while we were shooting this
dennis asked me hey do you think that
stuff's real
you don't know all right so we're almost
ready to fire it up but first i gotta
figure out
how to use the lg factory svc remote con
look at this thing like what is hdmi hot
usb hot
it's got all kinds of stuff on it hey
look at that okay it works just like a
normal one
so let's go ahead and turn on our gaming
pc
hey that was easy wow this looks
ridiculous dennis
you told me i looked dazzling i know
someone told me i like dazzling
you can see through it but like just
barely because it's so
it's so bright like it's basically the
same as an oled tv
like is that is that crazy like can you
see that
and then as soon as i go over here it's
like boom window or should i say windows
because it's it's a windows window wait
no
this is so weird it's like the game is
floating in the air like from your
from your angle can you
so have you seen how much you can see
through it from behind like you can
actually see
right through it from the back as well
oh yeah yeah like the game is running
here come around come around
don't cut like that's what's on the
screen right now
and then if you go around behind
it's like basically completely clear
it's nuts the trippiest thing about this
is that even when the image is
relatively bright
like what we're looking at right now can
i open this yeah i can open this
it's really about where your eyes focus
that determines sort of what you can see
and what you can't see
like when i'm focused on the image in
front of me
i can barely even tell that it's clear
but if i look behind it
where obviously my my game goes out of
focus
like i can see what's behind it i mean
this opens up so many
possibilities for changing the viewers
experience like obviously it's not the
kind of thing that would be applicable
to
movies or i mean even gaming we're just
fooling around right now
but for signage or
for you know custom experiences
it's really cool you know what we should
do i should try and play from the back
like i can only kind of see a ghost of
the image remember how
the challenge here was getting the
electronics
aligned with the self-emitting
pixels right i mean looking at how thin
this is like this bezel
is nothing to do with how thin the
actual
glass is like would it even would it be
possible
to create one that works on both sides
where you could actually
you know you could turn it clear like
imagine that as a head-to-head gaming
experience right
where you've got one person playing on
one side you've got one person playing
on the other side
and then you know after the match is
over you can you can see each other
or if you focused hard enough like past
the glass you could
like you could see the other player you
couldn't see what they're doing because
like i can barely make out what's on the
other side of the display but
like the possibilities are just kind of
endless right
oh okay i think part of the problem is
that i'm trying to go left and i'm going
right
yeah i got no idea what's going on
this was a better idea on paper
ah yes well that is significantly better
knowing how it's assembled i shouldn't
be that surprised but
i still am by the the vibrancy of the
color
and the brightness of the image like you
think about no
it's a clear display like you wouldn't
really expect that but
honestly i think the only thing really
preventing this
from looking like a normal oled tv right
now
is that the wall behind us is kind of
gray
actually new idea so lg says they can
kill the lights in here
and we can just unplug these things okay
do you guys want to go ahead and do that
so this should give us an idea of what
this would look like
with a much more black background
nice oh that's crazy
look at this so even the parts where
we've got the gray and white background
you can barely see it like can you see
me right now
that's crazy so like imagine this
what if you could have a tv that maybe
used like
a secondary layer or something like some
kind of
polarization filter or like i don't even
know where you could convert
between transparent and opaque you could
easily convince me that this is just a
tv
so theoretically the closer you get the
easier it should be to see through like
like a screen door but in practice
actually i find the closer i get
the more the brightness of the of the
oleds just
kind of overwhelms my eyes like i can't
actually
see through it like can you see me at
all no
i'm leaving for me the exciting thing
here is just as this continues to
develop like what kinds of possibilities
we're going to unlock i mean even things
that have been imagined already like
smart mirrors for example
are we better off with a two-way mirror
in front of a conventional display
or you know what if we did have uh a
transparent display
over top of a conventional reflective
back i don't know i mean let me know in
the comments below
what you guys foresee for a technology
like this
in the future and while you guys are
down below by the way you can check out
lg's dedicated site to oled technology
so they're going to have information
about oleds
content about oleds articles that are
written about oled technology
i think right now it's korean only but i
believe they're gonna have an english
version coming
sometime in the near future so guys you
can check that out below
and that's honestly pretty much it for
the video today
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