When Tony Stark reads TV Tropes.
Your work takes place 20 Minutes into the Future, and you want to make sure your audience knows it. How do you communicate this without explicitly saying so? Simple: Show someone using technology that is similar to something we have today, but transparent. Usually, this will be a computer screen or a personal electronic device similar to a tablet or smartphone.
From a cinematography standpoint, Transparent Tech is great because you can more easily show what the person sees on the screen and their reaction to it simultaneously, and because, well, it looks cool. However, in real life, it can be impractical due to insufficient contrast between the display and what's behind it. Also, it may not be desirable for people on the other side of the screen to be able to see what's being displayed.
To put the work a little further into the future, writers may use the Holographic Terminal or Force-Field Door subtropes. Overlaps with Unusual User Interface. Compare Everything Is an iPod in the Future, where the future setting is communicated by making things look like they were designed by Apple. More likely to be found on the shiny end of the Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty (though they can exist in gritty settings), and where the Ascetic Aesthetic is present. Almost always a display of some kind, but anything where its transparency demonstrates that it's higher tech than what was available in the real world at the time would count. See also Data Crystal.
Despite this trope typically being used to show the work takes place in the future, the technology for transparent displays exists today
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Examples:
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Films — Live-Action
- Avatar: Transparent screens are seen in the avatar labs where Jake Sully's body is usually found, which is the most high-tech room in the film.
- Children of Men: The car that the Fishes drive has the digital speedometer, proximity warnings, and other dashboard elements on a heads-up display on the windshield.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe: Transparent tech is pervasive at S.H.I.E.L.D. Particularly notable in The Avengers (2012), when Tony Stark and Bruce Banner have a conversation through one.
- Minority Report: John Anderton's use of a large transparent screen with gesture controls is possibly the Trope Codifier.
- Real Steel: Clear glass computer screens are a fixture of the near-future setting, most prominently in the ringside control stations at the robot arena, allowing the controllers to see the robots through their displays (and the camera to capture their reactions from the ring). Tak punches through his screen in frustration during one bout.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek (2009): A transparent screen is present in the transporter room. Notably, it's directly above another, more traditional console, with no obvious reason why the two different types of displays are used.
- Star Trek Into Darkness: Unlike the typical Force-Field Door you see in Star Trek, the cells in the brig are secured with what looks like giant glass panes, but with a special port on them that can be adjusted from the outside to allow objects to be passed through.
- Star Wars: Glass computer displays are found alongside Holographic Terminals in the sci-fi setting. Command centers in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back have large floor-to-ceiling screens◊ throughout the room, and the flagship in Return of the Jedi has smaller ones mounted around the bridge.
Live-Action TV
- Altered Carbon: The series uses transparent screens to show that it takes place in the 24th century.
- Black Mirror: Some episodes set in near-future dystopias make use of transparent screens to demonstrate that it's the future, but one we're not that far away from.
- The Cape: Orwell has a transparent screen in her command center, showing how high-tech she is. It helps she's played by Summer Glau.
- Earth: Final Conflict: Taelon shuttles have open fronts that generate forcefields while flying, which double as control panels that can be controlled by hand gestures.
- The Expanse: People have transparent mobile devices. The showrunners refer to them as "hand terminals," in that rather than being powerful mobile computers themselves, they are relatively dumb interfaces to more powerful devices nearby.
- Extinct: Characters are shown using transparent tablets just before the alien invasion. Notably, this is the only future tech shown in use by civilians; other tech is only used by people who are in or working with the FBI or military.
- Murderbot takes place in a galaxy-spanning far-future civilization, complete with transparent vertical computer displays. (More technologically impressive, though less useful as set pieces, are the people who use Augmented Reality or cybernetic implants instead.)
- Odd Squad: Played with. It's not entirely clear whether the franchise takes place in the future or not, with the Odd Squad Agent's Handbook only suggesting it takes place sometime in the 2010s. However, the titular organization is very futuristic when it comes to its headquarters' designs as well as its gadgetry, some of which surpass the inventions of Real Life, with Orpita claiming it is "at the leading edge of technology" in the Odd Squad: Mobile Unit episode "Welcome to Odd Squad". The Odd Squad episode "Happily Ever Odd" in particular has Otis attempting to activate his smartwatch for help solving an equation, only for Oona to stop him by telling him that she doesn't want any of "that old-fashioned stuff in here" and project a transparent computer screen by shooting a beam into the air. Once the equation is solved, she blows on the screen, causing it to disappear.
- Parks and Recreation: Ended season six with a three-year time jump. When a seventh season was approved, the new time skip was shown partially by Gryzzl's new technology which included transparent tech.
- Second Chance (2016): Transparent tech is used to emphasize how the protagonist's future environment after being reborn is different from what he's used to. (Note that his home has a CRT television.)
- Star Trek: For much of the franchise's history, transparent displays weren't really used at all, although the occasional Holographic Terminal would show up. The most common transparent technology you'd see is the Force-Field Door, especially in the brig. Discovery had transparent displays on the bridge, along with regular displays. Oddly, they are clearly set in locations where contrast would be a problem.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: Per the Post-Cyberpunk setting, many advanced tech such as the Grom System, monitor displays within the Neon Cities, and Holographic Terminals utilized by The Consortium have a completely transparent sight to demonstrate a clear interface.
- Mass Effect:
- Giant see-through glass screens appear to be used just as often as Holographic Terminals in setting.
- Mass Effect 3 introduces the Omni-Blade, a transparent silicon-carbide blade flash-forged by a character's Omni-Tool and suspended in a mass effect field near their arm. It's actually surrounded by a hologram to make it easier to see.
- Resident Evil 6: Characters' personal electronics are transparent. The game largely takes place in 2013, one year after its release.
Web Animation
- RWBY: Everyone has collapsible, smartphone-like devices called "scrolls" which have transparent screens. In addition to typical smartphone functions, during combat scrolls also display the strength of the user's aura, as well as those of their teammates. They can be used to call one's weapon locker, and on one occasion are even seen serving as game controllers.
Web Comics
- The Croaking: The technology on Kooup the Avians use is advanced, with laser pistols and ubiquitous transparent smartphones being prime examples.
- Widdershins: When Alexa exploits a Place Beyond Time to send a video message to her 2013-era phone from 2032, her new phone is a piece of folding glass, matching what's seen of that era's aesthetic.
Real Life
- While Apple had translucent plastic casings on their products before then, the iMac G3 particularly brought the idea to public prominence when it was introduced in 1998. The futuristic look of it and the fact that it came in a variety of bright, marketable colors both contributed to its success and made fluorescent translucent tech a popular fad up through the early 2000s, encompassing devices such as telephones, electric toothbrushes, and video game systems.
- While not exactly physical tech, transparency in the form of glass-like effects was prominent in the late 2000s in an aesthetic known as Frutiger Aero. Windows Vista was one of the highest-profile uses of this design. It fell off by the mid-2010s in favor of flatter UI design languages. However, it was picked up again in the mid-2020s with Windows 11 introducing a frosted glass-like GUI design language known as Fluent Design and Apple going all-in on Liquid Glass.