from Hacker News

A Transparent Display with Per-Pixel Color and Opacity Control

by fezz on 8/1/19, 12:31 AM with 11 comments

• by fizzledbits on 8/1/19, 6:43 AM

  I saw this in person yesterday at Siggraph and it works perfectly. No perceptible flickering, fully opaque images (when the alpha mask is on), cap touch, good color fidelity. It’s a simple, terrific idea.

• by zeta0134 on 8/1/19, 1:15 AM

  I'm not sure what's going on with the original link, but this shortened link seems to actually work:

  https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3327984

  The concept seems clever (rapidly alternate between illuminating the front-panel, and illuminating the contents of the enclosure while displaying a transparency negative on the front panel) but the requirement for an enclosure and controllable backlight limits the scope of the approach. Still, those results look pretty good for mostly off the shelf hardware.

• by taneq on 8/1/19, 2:34 AM

  Wow, very impressive effect! How long until something similar to this makes its way into AR glasses for overlaying proper solid-looking rendered objects? The sticking point would seem to be the cutover from masking to backlighting the screen, so maybe a transparent OLED display backed by an LCD screen acting as a shutter?

• by reaperducer on 8/1/19, 5:10 AM

  I've seen something similar to this implemented on high end slot machines in Vegas.

  It looks like several layers of transparent LCD screens and combined they give a 3D look.

• by ChuckMcM on 8/1/19, 1:13 AM

  Uh this is broken. Can someone post a link to a5-rhodes.pdf directly?

  I managed to read it by going here: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3327984 and then clicking the PDF link. Apparently it drops a cookie or something.