Samsung is apparently planning on revealing a television at CES 2013 that will take TVs to the next level: see through.

Yesterday, on the Samsung blog, the company showed a picture of a vertically sitting television.  In the picture is a landscape type background which you can see directly through the TV.  While Samsung didn’t give any details about the TV, it did a it did say  “A true innovation of TV design is coming up with an unprecedented new TV shape and timeless design”.

So the questions that will have to wait until next weeks Consumer Electronics Show are, is this tv going to attempt to convert TV to portrait viewing?  Is this truly a see through set, or are they just showing off the realism of the display?

Last year if we recall, Samsung did show off a transparent LCD panel  designed for store windows and kiosks, so this wouldn’t be that much of a stretch considering they did hint that a 46 inch version was in the works.

Check the picture, what is your opinion? If a see-through TV did exist, what practical implications does it have? Would you want one?

[ source ]

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There’s a lot of high-tech stuff going on in the recent Avengers movie, but perhaps even more interesting is the glimpse we get inito the future of computing through those user interfaces.

We’ve seen the inside of Iron Man’s helmet before, showing us the heads-up display that Robert Downey Jr. uses to monitor the status of his suit and to target all the bad guys. There’s a lot of information being flashed at him all at once and you almost get the sense that they represent the evolution of the homescreen widget.

You’ll also notice that a lot of the displays are transparent. That’s already happening, to a certain extent, by Samsung and other companies. And again, we get those fancy blinking widgets again. You might also remember the scene where a window can be “swiped” over from one workstation to the next.

There is a lot of detail going on with these user interfaces. You can thank freelance visual artist Jayse Hansen, who was responsible for that work in The Avengers. It does make me wonder if these UIs are closer in scope to the future of Windows, Apple, or something else entirely.

I also wonder if the menu at the shawarma place is going to look like this one day…

[Source]

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We have seen it in many spy movies, but there’s a possibility that you might play with one sometime in the near future. At this year’s CES, we saw the Lumus transparent wearable AR display and the company revealed a new optical engine at the Mobile World Congress. The Lumus OE-31 see-through wearable display can be integrated in regular glasses. As you can see above, the eyewear in the picture comes with an embedded MP3 player; the OE-31 is on its left side.

As you might know, Google is also reportedly developing something similar. Their AR glasses will provide you with information as you gaze upon the world. But, while that design is said to involve an opaque display over one eye, the Lumus OE-31 will add an image layer (with nHD resolution) on top of what you see through the glasses.

The possibilities for the new technology are certainly endless. For example, athletes can use eyewear with OE-31 for getting info such as speed, lap time, and heart rate while jogging or biking. Or you will be able to connect it with a smartphone and, using GPS, see the directions to a place on the display while you are walking on the road.

Of course, a lot of developers will be needed to bring out interesting applications. But we are not quite sure whether it will be fun to have a display in front of our eyes like this; we will be taking a closer look at this in the very near future to see how it’s like. In the meantime, you can take a peek at the clips below to see what the OE-31 has to offer.

The post Lumus OE-31 Transparent Wearable Display (Video) appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It appears like the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds are getting thinner and thinner. Microsoft’s Applied Sciences team has shown off their prototype 3D desktop which allows you to interact with the objects on a transparent screen with something called “view-dependent, depth-corrected gaze”.

The team has been studying what things they can do with a transparent Samsung OLED screen and Microsoft’s Kinect technology, along with some special software. What they have come up with is a virtual desktop which can be manipulated with the hands in real-time.

As you will see in the video clip below, there is a keyboard behind the transparent screen which does the same job as your normal computer keyboard. But to interact with the desktop, instead of using a mouse, you just have to reach up and manipulate the virtual objects with your fingers. What makes this possible is the Kinect tech.

The Kinect sensors will track where your hand is and at the same time will also detect your head and eye position for delivering a 3D image with depth and perspective based on your position. But sometimes a short clip is better than a thousand words. So check out the video below and don’t forget to place your thoughts below.

Head here to stay updated about all the things from MWC 2012.

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Although there are many different stylus designs out there to choose from for the Apple iPad, we encourage you to check this one out. The jaja is the first ever pressure sensitive stylus for the iPad and it appears to be pretty impressive.

As you might agree, all the current iPad stylus designs are nothing much more than sticks and there aren’t any compelling reasons to use one instead of your finger. That is where the jaja comes in.

The jaja stylus comes with a new system developed by Silicon Spark called the “ii” system. This new system allows jaja to communicate the pressure that a user applies on the display. And you won’t need wires, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

The two customisable buttons on the stylus will allow you to select menus, and you will be able to change brushes, colors, fonts or tools and all that can be done without moving far from the drawing space.

For communicating with the iPad, the jaja uses high frequency sounds that are above human hearing but can be detected by the iPad microphone. The makers are promising 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity, and the stylus has a transparent tip and a USB plug for quick recharging.

The jaja will retail for $69.95 once it gets funding from Kickstarter, and at present is available in black. Check out the video and head here to know more about it.

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If you were hoping for a future transparent smartphone or tablet, your wish might just come true.

Don’t hold your breath just yet, but in a few years you might be enjoying your first translucent device. After the invention of different see-through electronic components, a new big step ahead has been recently made by Stanford researcher Yi Cui.

He created a transparent power source.  The reason why batteries haven’t been made transparent until now is because, while other electronic components may be rendered transparent by shrinking them, it is rather difficult to make electrodes thin. But Cui and his team figured out the way to pattern electrodes into a superfine mesh and build an energy dense battery that holds a significant charge.

Cui managed to make the components so small as they are beyond human eye resolution, thus becoming transparent. Well, their work wasn’t as simple as it may appear, but if you are interested how did Cui’s team manage to make power sources transparent, the entire process has been recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their invention may prove to be really useful, besides its aesthetic appeal, since this kind of battery could make devices smaller, lighter and more compact.

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A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to check out the Samsung transparent AMOLED display at CES. That’s just a prototype, but what about stuff that will eventually make it into the hands of real customers? Well, that’s starting too, because Samsung has just started to mass produce some see-through screens.

They’re not the AMOLED wonders that I saw, but the transparent LCD panels are almost as impressive. They’re going to come in your choice of either black and white or full color, but both 22-inch panels have a resolution of 1680×1050 and a contrast ratio of 500:1. The monochrome edition has better transparency (over 20%) than its color counterpart (over 15%) though.

What’s interesting is that these transparent LCD panels don’t have any traditional backlighting, relying instead on ambient light to make the images viewable. That allows them to consume 90% less electricity… except you’ll need some more ambient light to make them usable at all, of course.

I somehow doubt that these panels will be all that useful to the average consumer, but imagine walking past a display window at the mall and in addition to seeing the featured product, you get this transparent LCD highlighting some of its selling points for you. Pretty sweet. Something like the Aston Martin smart phone concept may be closer than we think.

[Read]

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To some people, the idea of luxury for a cell phone is to riddle it up with diamonds and gemstones. That’s just unnecessarily gaudy. Aston Martin has a different idea when it comes to understated classiness and that’s demonstrated by the luxury car company’s upcoming smartphone concept. It’s clear.

Aston Martin is partnering up with Canada’s Mobiado to produce “a line of high-end handsets to be launched in May of this year.” The most impressive of the bunch is the CPT002, because it is constructed for a single slab of solid sapphire crystal, resulting in a completely transparent capacitive touchscreen.

Yes, you can see right through the phone… aside from the Mobiado and Aston Martin marques. What about the components, you might ask? Well, they’ve hidden the battery, SIM card, and other electronic doodahs into the platinum sides of the phone. That’s crazy and it really puts something like the Atrix or iPhone to shame.

Too bad the Aston Martin CPT002 is just a concept. It’d go really well with my DB9.

[GizMag, Mobiado]

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Have you ever wanted to look at the display on your notebook, for example, while still watching the big game on the TV behind it? Normally, your head (or eyes) have to keep bouncing between the two. If you want to keep your head and eyes right where they are, you might want to know about the new Samsung Transparent AMOLED display for TVs and monitors.

There are two reasons why this display is noteworthy. First, it is the world’s first large-screen transparent AMOLED production prototype. Up until now, we’ve only seen this kind of tech on a much smaller scale. Second, the prototype AMOLED is able to provide up to 30% transparency. Samsung says other similar displays has averaged “below 10 percent.”

You probably won’t want to do too much heavy lifting with this screen, since it only does qFHD (960×540), but it’d be great for the NFL Wild Card games this weekend. Keep up with the stats on NFL.com while watching the TV behind your notebook screen. That would be, you know, if this was somewhere beyond prototype status.

In any case, seeing this display in person was quite intriguing. The display itself wasn’t quite as “crisp” and “bright” as you’d get with conventional AMOLED, but the demo box they had set up really helped to show you can see past the display. In this case, they had a fashion show on the screen and a (physical) dressing room in the back. Pretty neat stuff.

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