Your next OLED TV could hold your Elf on a Shelf, too

Your adjacent OLED TV could concord your Elf on a Shelf, too

(Image credit: LG)

LG Display seems hell-bent on squeezing transparent OLED tech into every piece of furniture in our homes, offices, and department stores. At CES 2022, the company is announcing a handful of oddball and exciting semi-transparent display innovations, including a bookshelf, chosen OLED Shelf, that doubles as a larger, hanging display.

Indeed, the South Korean tech giant's latest targets include windows, display cases, and even bookshelves -- unlikely locations for transparent screens, mayhap, merely a clear signal of how tech is transforming our lives.

OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens are now thin and light enough to get nigh anywhere, in function because they practice not require backlighting. Terminal week, LG Display unveiled OLED screens in a rotating easy chair and every bit a caput-to-toe curved display for a spin bicycle.

For its OLED Shelf, LG hung two 55-inch 40%-transparent OLED panels from a wall shelf (LG claims these are the largest transparent OLEDs in the world). The two screens are serially connected and hang downward to another base shelf to course a relatively rigid frame. The top screen serves as a traditional TV, while the lesser half is more of a passive display for showing weather, news, and other updates.

When it's time to watch Tv, an opaque screen rolls down from the top shelf, correct behind the top OLED display, which offers about 400 nits of effulgence.

Fifty-fifty when you lot're not watching TV, the tiptop display can show off a gallery of art and the bottom screen can provide context for the paradigm on the top screen, listing the creative person and when they created the work.

LG told TechRadar the production is ready for commercial product, but they withal need a partner to build and sell the organisation. As for what the shelf tin can concord, LG told us it'due south stiff enough for some knick-knacks similar a vase or your vacation elf.

Meeting of the future

LG is as well pushing the limits of what you can do with and how we might think about display transparency. In its Show Window concept, LG demonstrated how a transparent panel could exist built into a corporate meeting room window (the wiring and power are hidden in the window bezel).

Even as the display allows for an effectively clear view of the exterior globe, the OLED technology displays a video of meeting participants and touch on-screen presentation elements. At that place'south as well the possibility of the Evidence Window offering a window into a completely different world – if we ever adopt the Metaverse and add it to our corporate meeting routine.

LG is too collaborating with retailers in South korea to integrate transparent OLED displays with product showcases, or what it calls "Shopping Managing Showcase," which places a transparent OLED inside a wooden display case. Inside the case are concrete products. Customers looking through the OLED screens see both the existent products and visually engaging and, sometimes, useful video information (like current sales).

At that place's likewise a new "Show Window" concept that looks, naturally, like a free-continuing window, but each pane is a transparent OLED screen that could be used for advert or even to display personalized messaging to a passerby (our guess is that this could apply beacon technology to connect with passing smartphones and, with permission, use shared data to create the messaging).

In Japan and China, LG's transparent screens are appearing in subway systems where riders tin can both see outside the rail cars and get information about their trips on the see-through OLED-covered windows.

From shelves to products cases, and role windows, the possibilities with OLED are seemingly countless. Nevertheless, LG Display and its partners have yet to overcome the applied science'due south biggest hurdle: toll. A flexible OLED that'due south used in LG's rollable TV, which rolls out of a narrow box to go a rigid, 65-inch 4K TV, still costs $100,000.

Need something a bit more than applied? Check out our guide to the best TVs of 2021!

A 35-yr industry veteran and laurels-winning journalist, Lance has covered technology since PCs were the size of suitcases and "on line" meant "waiting." He's a onetime Lifewire Editor-in-Chief, Mashable Editor-in-Chief, and, before that, Editor in Chief of PCMag.com and Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff Davis, Inc. He also wrote a popular, weekly tech column for Medium called The Upgrade.

Lance makes frequent appearances on national, international, and local news programs including Live with Kelly and Ryan, Fox News, Fox Business, the Today Evidence, Practiced Morning America, CNBC, CNN, and the BBC.