A rare sight out in the wild, LG Display brought some of its transparent OLED displays to the Guggenheim in New York City that took place on June 1.
According to LG Display, the displays were used at the Young Collector’s Council (YCC) Party to show a video of different photo frames, providing guests with background visuals for their photos.
The screens were all 55 inches in size and had a 40% transparency — a potentially perfect size and opacity for a home living room.
Admittedly, using a transparent OLED as a photo frame isn’t the coolest use of the technology and largely shows us how commercial businesses can leverage transparent displays, but it does give us an idea of how the technology could be used to revolutionize the living room TV in the future.
Are transparent OLED displays the future of TV?
Although it’s interesting to finally see it in public, this isn’t the first time LG has shown off its transparent OLED models — they’ve made an appearance at a number of CES events stretching all the way back to 2016.
In fact, last year at CES 2021 LG Display circulated a video of a transparent OLED that disappeared into a bed frame when it’s not in use, and could be used to watch TV while laying in bed.
Before that, LG Display has talked about using transparent OLEDs as train windows and sliding glass doors — pretty much anything that should be a window when not in use is perfect fodder for a transparent OLED.
What does that mean for home use? Well, unlike the best OLED TVs out there now, a transparent OLED might mean that TVs don’t need to be placed on a wall or on a stand. They could be placed in the center of a room with a circle of chairs around it. They could also replace large bay windows in a home or, even, in a car one day.
That’s obviously just conjecture based on the applications we’ve seen from LG Display so far, but the implication there is that the technology could enable us to put TVs in places we’ve never seen before.
Until then, however, at least we have the LG G2 OLED.
