Lenovo’s transparent laptop: A peek into a sci-fi future

As the pixels illuminate, the display gradually loses its transparency until it becomes completely opaque, hitting a peak brightness of 1,000 nits. Photo: Collected

A year after unveiling a rollable laptop that extended its screen with the simple push of a button, Lenovo returned to the stage at the Mobile World Congress recently in Barcelona, Spain, showcasing yet another futuristic concept.

The ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop is a 17.3-inch notebook with a screen that allows you to see straight through it.

The main attraction is its bezel-less 17.3-inch MicroLED display, boasting up to 55% transparency when its pixels are set to black and deactivated. However, as the pixels illuminate, the display gradually loses its transparency until it becomes completely opaque, hitting a peak brightness of 1,000 nits.

While the allure of transparent screens in sci-fi narratives is evident, the practical applications in real life are less clear. How often do we genuinely desire to see the empty space behind our laptops? Would being able to see your colleague across from you be beneficial or distracting?

While the allure of transparent screens in sci-fi narratives is evident, the practical applications in real life are less clear. How often do we genuinely desire to see the empty space behind our laptops? Would being able to see your colleague across from you be beneficial or distracting?

Lenovo proposes that the form factor could be advantageous for digital artists, allowing them to observe the world behind the laptop's screen while sketching on the lower half using the keyboard, according to a report by The Verge.

However, integrating a transparent display into a laptop presents specific challenges — notably resolution — which is more crucial on a device designed for displaying text than on a TV meant for showing images. This is why Lenovo opted for a MicroLED panel over an OLED one, although the 17.3-inch display in this concept offers only 720p resolution.

AG Zheng, Lenovo's executive director of SMB Product and Solutions, explains that choosing an OLED panel would have limited the resolution to as low as 480p. Despite 720p still feeling like a work-in-progress specification for a laptop of this size, the text displayed during demos was perfectly legible.

Photo: Collected

Alongside the transparent display, Lenovo's laptop concept includes a completely flat-touch keyboard, eliminating physical keys. Initially perceived as a sci-fi gimmick, it is actually intended to cater to artists.
The keyboard visible on the laptop is actually a projection, which disappears when a stylus approaches the drawing surface or when the user steps away from the device.

However, when not sketching, users have to utilise the flat surface as a touch-sensitive keyboard, which was deemed the weakest aspect of the prototype. Mechanical keyboard enthusiasts might, unsurprisingly, not enjoy tapping their fingers on an image of a keyboard which could result in numerous typos.

Similar to last year's rollable laptop, Lenovo acknowledges that it has no immediate plans to release the ThinkBook Transparent Display Laptop as a consumer product. By unveiling this proof of concept, Lenovo hopes to stimulate public discourse on its potential applications, setting a target for future development.