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”
Sam Byford / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Oppo has been working around the front-camera problem mechanically: its Find X hid both cameras in a motorized slide-up section rather than cutting a notch into the display. The new demo swaps machinery for materials — a custom transparent panel that lets the selfie sensor see through the screen itself.
The approach builds on an under-display sensing playbook Chinese vendors have been running for years, starting with Vivo's demo of Qualcomm's ultrasonic fingerprint sensors that work through glass. What was a prototype in mid-2019 became a shipping category fast: ZTE moved first to mass production with the Axon 20 5G, and Xiaomi followed by declaring its own under-display camera consumer-ready.
First-order effects
- Oppo gains a notch-free full-screen design that needs no moving parts, retiring the reliability and thickness costs of the Find X-style slider.
- Every rival still selling notches or punch holes — Xiaomi and ZTE most visibly — now has to answer a demo that promises an invisible front camera in a commercial phone.
Second-order effects
- Display suppliers get a new premium component category — transparent-substrate panels engineered around a camera cutout — splitting the display bill of materials between optical clarity and pixel density.
- ZTE's first-to-mass-production move forces faster commercialization timelines across the group, with Xiaomi publicly committing to ship rather than stay at the demo stage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the front of a phone consolidates into a single sensor stack under the glass — camera, fingerprint reader, speaker — turning display integration, not camera specs, into the differentiator among Chinese Android vendors.
- Vendors that cannot source or co-develop transparent display material risk ceding the full-screen design tier to the few who can, echoing how under-display fingerprint adoption concentrated among early movers like Vivo.
The trend: Smartphone front-end hardware is migrating underneath the display, as vendors trade mechanical pop-ups and notches for cameras and sensors built into the panel itself.