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 if you guys disliked it you can
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