A 12 months after flexing its R&D muscle mass with a rollable laptop computer that expanded its display with a easy button push, Lenovo is again at Cellular World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, with one other in some way much more sci-fi idea system. That is the ThinkBook Clear Show Laptop computer, a 17.3-inch pocket book with a display you may peer straight by means of.
The important thing draw is its bezel-less 17.3-inch MicroLED show, which provides as much as 55 p.c transparency when its pixels are set to black and turned off. However as its pixels mild up, the show turns into much less and fewer see-through, till finally, you’re taking a look at a totally opaque white floor with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits.
Though the enchantment of clear screens in sci-fi movies and TV exhibits is apparent (opaque screens are boring, actor’s faces are fascinating), it’s quite a bit tougher to place your finger on their sensible makes use of in actual life. How usually, after all, do you really need to see the empty desk behind your laptop computer? Would it not be helpful to have the ability to see your colleague sitting throughout from you, or wouldn’t it be distracting?
One in all Lenovo’s huge concepts is that the shape issue could possibly be helpful for digital artists, serving to them to see the world behind the laptop computer’s display whereas sketching it on the decrease half of the laptop computer the place the keyboard is (extra on this later). “I’m not a superb artist,” Lenovo’s govt director of ThinkPad portfolio and product Tom Butler admits to me in an interview, “however I can carry one thing behind and I can hint it.” Within the room we’re sitting in, which means pulling a bunch of sunflowers behind the laptop computer display, however Butler pitches the concept of an architect with the ability to sit on location and sketch a constructing with out taking their eyes off the surroundings in entrance of them. He even goes so far as to name the clear laptop computer show a type of augmented actuality.
Lenovo is the most recent in a protracted line of corporations to experiment with clear shows. Samsung confirmed off a clear laptop computer idea over a decade in the past at CES 2010, and even Lenovo itself exhibited a clear smartphone idea in 2015 by way of its now-defunct Zuk Cellular subsidiary. However as time’s gone on, we’ve seen some early makes an attempt to commercialize the know-how. Clear screens have cropped up as store shows and practice carriage home windows in China and Japan, and LG says it really plans to ship its OLED Signature T clear TV this 12 months.
However there are some particular challenges with constructing a clear show right into a laptop computer. Most notable is decision, which is extra vital on a laptop computer designed to point out textual content than a TV designed to point out pictures. That, by the way, is why Lenovo tells me it went for a MicroLED panel over an OLED. Though the 17.3-inch show on this idea is barely 720p, AG Zheng, Lenovo’s govt director of SMB product and options, tells me that going with an OLED would have restricted the corporate to a decision as little as 480p. 720p nonetheless looks like a really work-in-progress spec on a 17.3-inch laptop computer like this, however not less than textual content proven on the display throughout my demo was completely readable.
One other signal that this can be a work in progress? It’s not doable on Lenovo’s present prototype to manually set the entire laptop computer display to be opaque, no matter whether or not it’s exhibiting white content material, black content material, or any colours in between. “That completely is one thing that we might need if we had been going into manufacturing,” Butler says. It’s one thing that LG is utilizing distinction movie to realize on its OLED T tv.
In addition to the clear show, Lenovo’s laptop computer idea additionally has a totally flat contact keyboard, relatively than a bodily keyboard with keys you may really feel and press. When pictures of this system first began leaking, I assumed this was meant as simply one other sci-fi flourish, but it surely’s really a part of Lenovo’s pitch for artists. That’s as a result of in addition to functioning like a keyboard, the laptop computer’s base can be designed to work as a drawing pill.
The keyboard that you would be able to see on the laptop computer is definitely a projection, which disappears while you carry a stylus near the drawing floor and even while you step away from the laptop computer fully. Then you definately’re left with a flat floor to sketch on, just like what you’d discover in a screen-less Wacom pill.
The draw back is that while you’re not sketching, it’s important to use the utterly flat floor as a touch-sensitive keyboard, which was positively the weakest component of the prototype system. It is not going to shock you to listen to that this mechanical keyboard fan didn’t love stabbing his fingers at a picture of a keyboard, and I made limitless typos in my try to put in writing a easy check sentence.
This being 2024, there was additionally an AI component to Lenovo’s demonstration. The corporate had arrange a small digicam on the rear aspect of the laptop computer’s chassis to carry out object recognition on gadgets positioned behind it. The outcomes of this might then be proven on-screen whereas it was nonetheless in full view. Put sunflowers behind the laptop computer, and it’d determine them as such. Show some data, and present a butterfly flying round them. Put a small mannequin of coral and also you see a fish. It was very proof-of-concept stuff.
Like its rollable laptop computer from final 12 months, Lenovo isn’t pretending that it has any plans to launch its ThinkBook Clear Show Laptop computer as a client system. However Butler says he has “very excessive confidence” that its applied sciences will make it into an actual laptop computer within the subsequent 5 years and hopes that revealing this proof of idea will begin a public dialog about what it could possibly be helpful for, setting a goal for Lenovo to work towards.
Extra so than its rollable laptop computer with its easy pitch of “extra display with the flip of a change,” Lenovo’s clear laptop computer idea looks like a set of cool applied sciences seeking a killer app. Sketching one thing positioned behind the laptop computer display is fascinating however looks like a distinct segment use case even amongst digital artists — you may all the time simply snap a photograph and hint that — and Lenovo’s AI demo looks like one thing you’d see a museum use to make an exhibit extra visually fascinating.
Till Lenovo finds its killer use case, we’re left with an exceptionally cool-looking system that’s able to some enjoyable novelties. Midway by means of my interview, I pulled my (decidedly nontransparent) MacBook’s display ahead to double-check my cellphone behind it, and Butler leaped on it instantly.
“You simply completely walked into that.”
Pictures by Jon Porter / The Verge