Gadgetory

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 in 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. sook and the rest of the team here I was able to gain a lot of insights here's a thing transparent displays are honestly nothing new in fact if you have a fancy-pants 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 then you would normally be able to - 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 percent 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. sook to tell me about one challenge and 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 that how a transparent display works I ask then well what exactly is the difference between the OLED pixel sheet and 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 20 ATT I 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 alright so they actually pre hooked us up an HDMI cable that plugs into just sort of this grey box here alright so we can go ahead and hook after that and 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 gonna 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 alright so we're almost ready to fire it up but first I got to 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 looks just like a normal one so let's go ahead and turn on our gaming PC hey I was easy wow this looks ridiculous Dennis you told me I looked dazzling I know someone told me I look dazzling you can see through it but like just barely cuz it's sold it's so bright like it's basically the same as an OLED TV look at that it's 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 cuz it's a Windows window wait it 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 on go 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 not the trickiest thing about this is that even when the image is relatively bright like what we're looking at right now 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 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 omitting 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 cuz like I can barely make out what's on the other side of the display but like that 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 its 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 you know 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 may be used like a secondary layer 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 should be to see through like us like a screen door but in practice actually I find it a closer I get the more the brightness of the of the oh let's just kind of overwhelms my eyes like I can't actually see through it like can you see me at all no I'm waving for me the exciting thing here is just as this continues to develop like what kinds of possibilities we're gonna 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 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 gonna have information about all Ed's content about all Ed's 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 I honestly pretty much it for the video today if you guys disliked it you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the tum just kidding you can't buy one of these yet but but later later it's it's gonna happen it's gonna happen while you're down there you can check out our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum