Oppo demos an under-screen selfie camera with a display using a custom transparent material, plans to launch in a commercial phone “in the near future”
Coming to a commercial phone ‘in the near future’ — The past couple of years of smartphone design have been dominated …
Context & Ripple Effects
Oppo has been chasing a notch-free front end for two years: its Find X hid the selfie and rear cameras in a slide-up section above the display, trading bezel elimination for moving parts. The new demo replaces that mechanism with a custom transparent display material that lets light reach an under-screen selfie camera.
It also extends a pattern Vivo started when it showed Qualcomm's ultrasonic fingerprint sensors working under glass — components disappearing into the panel rather than sitting on top of it. Within a year of this demo, Xiaomi declared its own under-display cameras consumer-ready and ZTE moved to mass production, so Oppo's 'near future' launch lands in a crowded field.
First-order effects
- Oppo gains a path to a full-screen flagship without the Find X's motorized assembly, cutting a mechanical failure point from its design.
- Rivals shipping under-display cameras — ZTE with the Axon 20 5G and Xiaomi with its consumer-ready version — turn Oppo's demo into a three-way race to claim invisibility and image quality.
Second-order effects
- Display suppliers now face a split requirement — normal pixel output plus a transparent window over the camera — making panel material engineering a differentiator rather than a commodity spec.
- Selfie image quality shot through pixels becomes a review battleground, pressuring camera tuning teams at all three vendors to compensate for light loss.
Third-order effects
- If transparent-material panels hold up commercially, notches and punch holes disappear as categories, and the front-of-phone design war shifts from shape to hidden-sensor performance.
- Component integration keeps moving beneath the glass — following the fingerprint-then-camera sequence — pushing phone differentiation toward what sensors can do through the display rather than how they are arranged around it.
The trend: Smartphone front-end design is shifting from mechanical workarounds like pop-ups and sliders to material-level transparency that hides sensors inside the display itself.