Are you talking about the transparent hand terminals? I think that effect was just to make it convenient to show the screen and the face of the person looking at it in the same frame—I don’t think there’s much demand for that in real life.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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Yeah, the problem with a display you can see through is that it makes it hard to see what's on the display. It looks cool, until you need to actually use it.
Plus the privacy issue.
If those were ever commercially sold, the first accessory would be an opaque back to put behind it.
You mean the hand terminal?
It depends on how close to the fictional device you mean it to be. For instance, it would appear they are just "dumb terminals" without local processing power. So the offloading of the processing power to the cloud should be possible today, but there probably isn't a use case for it yet.
Actually making it look like that shard of glass that shows you information on the screen? If you equip AR glasses it could potentially already be done, but again, I assume no one will build it as the use case isn't there.
It'd be an awkward device as per today, so would not be a commercial succes as of yet.
And if you mean controlling 3 dimensional projections from your phone, we can sorta do that right now, it's just clunky and expensive and there's very little actual demand for it outside of show business and art projects.
Since noone went into details on it yet,
LCDs are already transparent. They filter light, and usually their back is simply lit uniformly white. Instead you can use them freestanding and get a pane of glass you can selectively darken. This is sometimes used in custom pc cases to show info on a glass sidepanel.
Unfortunately the way LCDs work means they always darken by 50% at the brightest, much more if you add color filters to es ape b/w hell. If eink develops further and matches lcds in speed, it is probably possible to change the materials in one to make the pigment not block light when it is on one side.
As for getting brighter, that is on the edge of viable, since we are just short of microled screens. There are already larger screens using that technology, and if you really wanted to you could make small screens too, it would just be really expensive and manual. Viable mass production is still in development, current methods have too many dead pixels.
So within a few years and with some development to adjust eink to the purpose, it should be possible to get a pretty transparent pane that can become opaque and specular or matte in any color and saturation and brightness, and also emit light at will on its surface.
The driver electronics should be very shrinkable and could probably be made small enough you literally couldn't see them. The limit is probably gonna be the power source, which will likely have to wait for some far off material science magic like graphene capacitor batteries that manages to make it transparent so you can stick it inside the pane of glass.
I think the ability to just flick your phone display to any larger display nearby like they do would be pretty rad but would require a secure and universal protocol that every display manufacturer would need to follow, so this is probably just as unlikely as the plexiglass tablet phones they use in the show.
In a lot of dystopian scifi, basically everything, especially everything on one station, is manufactured and owned by one corporation. If Weyland-Yutani makes your handheld device, your wall monitor, the wireless AP in your apartment, the cell tower outside your apartment, the cell tower outside your apartment, and even your apartment itself, there's probably some integration.
The transparent screens exist now (see em in shopping malls and whatnot) but the other parts of a phone aren't transparent, like the system board, battery, etc. So those parts gotta shrink into the "handle" somehow.