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> hopes that revealing this proof of concept will start a public conversation about what it could be useful for, setting a target for Lenovo to work toward. So

• RandomLensman 3y ago
  As a style thing - why not?
• jfrbfbreudh 3y ago
  Why is this “baffling”?
  • OJFord 3y ago
    Typically you spend time and money developing a product or service that people want, solves some problem for them, etc. - not whatever whacky thing you can come up with without really knowing why and then present it to people in the hope that they'll figure out a reason to want it or find/create a problem for it to solve.
    • usrusr 3y ago
      But transparency is not the reason they spend time and money on microLED. MicroLED solves real problems that aren't "this screen lacks transparency". The transparency is just a cool show piece that happens when you don't package the panel with a frame and an opaque backdrop. What they did spend time and money on is giving some of their marketing people a presumably small budget to show that useless but cool thing r&d stumbled across to the public. It would be stupid not to.
• multimoon 3y ago
  Why is that a bad thing? I don’t see a problem with a company coming out with a demo of some cool tech they’ve come up with, and then asking their own consumer base if it’s something worth pursuing. This is a far better outcome than the marketing people at the company making that decision on their own, and we (the consumers) get to at least see the cool tech versus it being locked in the vaults of said companies. You have to remember that every company develops wacky stuff like this all the time to test out new concept tech, we just rarely see it as the consumers. This is the step before the money for R&D is spent to make it an actual consumer product, think like a concept car. People’s comments on this can cause tech from this concept to make it into other actual products for market. I applaud this sort of behavior from hardware OEMs, nothing is lost and a lot gained.
• usrusr 3y ago
  But it's refreshing to see them being open about it, instead of making up some fig leaf use case and claim that it will change the world forever. What I do wonder, with microLED being as transparent as they are before you add a backdrop layer, is how much of its (daytime) energy consumption could be supplied by making the backdrop photovoltaic. If you only light up a tiny battery percentage number on a 17" screen, chances are it could run energy-positive forever, but if you do the same black-on-white the very battery consumption would likely be near-indistinguishable from a simple black backdrop. How many pixels at break-even? This could be a revolution for outdoor devices that still use transflective displays that are either low-resolution or low-contrast. (I do suspect that resolution would be a limitation with microLED-on-photovoltaic as well, aiming that transparency is inversely proportional to resolution at a given manufacturing process)
• jonfw 3y ago
  In part it's marketing. Lenovo doesn't want to look like one of those cheap chinese brands that just slap commodity parts into plastic shells. They do real R&D and this is one of the ways they advertise that