LG imagines a bed with a hidden transparent OLED TV

LG Display continues its trend of reinventing the future of displays at CES 2021 with a new transparent TV. The panel is a 55-inch OLED, but its transparent design allows you to see through it even when it’s on and displaying an image.

The screen achieves 40% transparency, according to LG Display, which is an improvement over older transparent LCDs which the company says only achieved 10% transparency.

LG imagines the screen sitting at the foot of a bed, where it can partially or fully rise to display information or videos while maintaining a view of the other side of the screen. The panel as designed now has built-in speakers in the form of LG Display’s Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO) technology, which uses screen vibrations to produce sound. It’s the same sound system as LG’s other OLED prototype announced at CES this year, a foldable gaming monitor that can go from flat to curved.

LG says the transparent OLED assembly can also be moved around the house if you want to position it elsewhere (if that was something you could actually buy, which you can’t at the moment).

Image: LG screen

The company sees it as both a smart home device and one that could one day be used in public places, such as restaurants and on public transport.

“Transparent OLED is a technology that maximizes the benefits of OLED and can be used in a variety of places in our daily lives, from stores, shopping malls and architectural interiors to autonomous vehicles, subway trains and airplanes,” Jong -sun Park, LG Display’s senior vice president and chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “It will become a next-generation display capable of changing the existing display paradigm.”

Image: LG screen

This isn’t the first transparent screen to debut at CES; we’ve seen Samsung’s transparent OLED screens before, and Panasonic showed off a transparent screen prototype in 2016 (even though it was just HD). And it’s not even LG’s first transparent OLED – the company announced last month that it had started developing transparent OLED sliding doors for office buildings and retail spaces. LG also created a 77-inch curved transparent OLED in 2017 that it imagined could be used for signage or advertising.

But this is the first screen of this kind of LG Display, it is strictly designed as a TV that would fit in someone’s house, and not just as something you would see in a futuristic mall or other commercial location. .

This is just one of the many experimental prototypes of LG Display, some of which are turning into real products that you can buy. The company has been making waves in recent CES showcases with various iterations of its rollable OLED technology, while a commercial version of the TV using this technology finally went on sale in South Korea in October last year for an amount of $ 87,000.

Unfortunately, there is no indication as of yet that LG’s new transparent OLED TV will become a real product at some point in the future or how much it could cost if it does.