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 escape 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.
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 escape 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.