Meant to be Seen

The natural transparency of organic materials makes the OLED as sheer as standard glass or plastic when the power is turned off.

source: http://waclighting.com/sites/waclightin ... dwhite.pdf

(I naively assume that it is possible to manufacture transparent versions of Samsung's high resolution AMOLEDs.)

Oculus already uses low-persistence, which means the display is turned off for the most of the time. It seems like the low-persistence would naturally make transparent OLED a perfect match - instead of wasting 80-90% of time for blackness it could just "disappear" to make other things possible.

Would it be possible to use transparency of the display for internal purposes instead of see-through/AR? For example: to let some sensors see what's behind the display? The opaque case of the headset (or some additional thin opaque layer, if needed) would make the screen perfectly black, so the user wouldn't even be aware, that the headset contains a transparent display.

I've seen a proposal to create cascaded displays, but even more exciting idea is eye-tracking with a possibility to use quite large and capable cameras:



There must be a catch somewhere
The most obvious potential issue I can think of is an unwanted optical distortion caused by optics or non-optimal focus resulting in blurriness. However, the cameras should be right behind the thin OLED, almost touching it, so it probably wouldn't be that bad and maybe it would be possible to counter it with cameras' lenses(?).

I dont know how well the trackers would work thorough the screen, since the transparent electrodes of the screens are made of indium tin oxide which is a good material as a reflector in the infrared spectrum. Probably that could be fixed with graphene electrodes but unfortunately graphene is not commercially available yet. but this concept is really good!

What I also like about the idea of a camera behind the display is that it would be possible to image a larger part of the face and not just the pupils. In theory you could capture everything that is hidden behind the HMD and then merge it with information of an external camera to create a "perfect" avatar. This could be important for telepresence and social applications. Carmack was wondering in one of his tweets how much emotional cues you could deduce from just imaging the eyes, with a camera behind a transparent display this is no longer a worry. I was very impressed with this 4 year old Microsoft/Samsung demonstration (of course getting this to work inside an HMD is another matter and will be challenging )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgXoYdmKeLk

Sorry for resurrecting this thread but I believe the info here is incorrect, ITO is a bad IR reflector, maybe about 2%.