Transparent LED On Film Offers New Life And Option For Projected Illusion Creative

September 12, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Regular readers will have come across many, many posts here about different display technologies and visual tricks that create visual illusions generally labeled as holograms or holographic, though they’re not … really.

We’ve seen transparent LCDs, transparent OLEDs, projections of transparent film and those spinning LED light sticks. But I had not really thought about transparent mesh and films embedded with LEDs as alternative ways of going at it, because the pixel pitches haven’t really been tight enough to balance clarity of the visuals with transparency needs.

With almost fine pitch LED on film, that issue can kind of go away – though the tighter the pitch, the less transparency.

Jason Robinson, Managing Director of the UK-based creative tech shop Beatpixels, sent me a note about how re-purposed a creative piece done for a “Pepper’s Ghost” projection illusion on a 3.9mm pitch transparent LED screen in retail.

My company Beatpixels are specialists in Peppers Ghost and Holonet type displays. I have been following the advancements in transparent LED since its infancy.  I have just reposted something I thought you would like to see. 

We asked Jestan Yin at MXW Device to play our test Peppers Ghost files on their display.  What you see in the post is our old content playing on their new 3.9mm pitch transparent LED test screen.

Interesting to see content designed for transparent illusions more than a decade ago finding a new application to run on.