What may have been the coolest product to emerge from CES is the Samsung Transparent Smart Window, the full touch TFT (thin-film transistor) LCD display that turns any household window into a prop from Minority Report. The 46-inch, 1366x768 resolution display won the CES 2012 award for innovation and, from what we see in the demo below, it’s not hard to see why. Samsung Smart Window wraps the whole “minority report” experience right up.
Pretty cool stuff, but we can’t quite consider this to be “brand new” technology. Samsung revealed their transparent display back in March 2011 as a product that could be a successful advertising tool.
“Unfortunately that application proved too mundane to catch the public’s attention in quite the way Samsung hoped for,” explains Chris Davies in an article from Slash Gear. “Hence the return of the tech last week and the far more exciting prospect of your double-glazing telling you your latest Tweets, Facebook friend requests and Google+ Hangouts.”
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Cover of Minority ReportThe CES 2012 innovation award winner Samsung Smart Window is essentially a 46-inch LCD, only that it is completely see-through and can overlay touch controlled widgets as well as a browser and media.
Samsung also showed a series of applications running in its prototype device, including weather forecasts, flight information, Twitter feeds, view recipes, and a slick set of digital blinds that lets you control the amount of light coming in. You can also watch live TV or local media on this screen and even work with office productivity applications — though it hardly seems the best fit for this purpose.
The practical applications of the Smart Window go well beyond social media. Users can watch TV and video, surf the web, check out weather forecasts, flight information, or even display a recipe as they cook in the kitchen. And did you see the virtual blinds that let you control the light coming in?
The Smart Window display runs on ambient lighting, which allows the sunlight to power the LCD from the outside. And as Jose Vilches from Tech Spot explains, “privacy shouldn’t be a problem as the display reportedly acts as a two-way mirror — you can see out but not the other way around. Also, during the night time when there’s no light shining through the window powering the device, you can switch to night mode and use an edge-lit backlight instead.”
The Smart Window is still considered a “concept device” but the brass at Samsung have reportedly penciled Q4 2012 for production. A video report from MobileNations says that mass production will begin “in the coming months.”
The Samsung Smart is partially powered by the sun. The thing only requires 10% of normal power consumption. Thanks to its solar cells and the lucid screen it’s really eco-friendly since it uses the solar cells to charge it (partly), the ambient light as backing light during daytime and when it get’s dark it has two built in lights for that as well.
The Samsung Smart Window adds a 22 inch LCD flat screen that has a resolution of 1680 x 1050 resolution and has a 500:1 contrast ratio. If you want to gaze out into your yard through your kitchen window but get the weather forecast to decide whether gardening is a good idea for the day, the Smart Window will allow you to do both. Samsung’s new technology has made the traditional LCD up to 20 percent more transparent than old LCD technology. It uses HDMI and USB to interface with a computer.
The Samsung Smart Window runs on ambient lighting so the LCD is powered by the sunlight outside. Privacy shouldn’t be a problem. The Transparent Smart Window is built so that it looks like an ordinairy window for the outside viewer, in other words: they can’t see what’s going on on the screen - the display reportedly acts as a two-way mirror — you can see out but not the other way around. Also, during the night time when there’s no light shining through the window powering the device, you can switch to night mode and use an edge-lit backlight instead. The smart window display has daytime and nighttime modes. The brightness of the display is adjustable, and when ambient light isn’t available, the nighttime mode switches on a hidden BLU. When the BLU is off, the prototype uses one tenth the power of a normal LCD.
This makes wonder though, how stupid would it look for the one on the outside, seeing someone pulling and dragging its hands back and forth on, what for them looks like an ordinairy window.
- Samsung’s transparent display could help retailers draw crowds to windows (venturebeat.com)
- Samsung’s Transparent Display: Touch-Controlled, Eco-Friendly (wired.com)
- Samsung Transparent Smart Window floats Twitter over your garden (slashgear.com)
- Samsung 46-Inch Transparent Window LCD Display Goes Into Mass Production; To Be Yours in a Few Months (devicemag.com)
- With New See-Through Display, Samsung Puts the Window in Windows (core77.com)
- Whoa! Samsung’s smart window brings “Minority Report” to life (cbsnews.com)
- My computer runs on Window: Innovative new screen can show your PC’s display on a transparent pane of glass (dailymail.co.uk)
(Source: technologyreview.com)
