JANUS

Transparent display has already become an icon of the future. It is described in fancy ways in many movies; its transparency provides compelling visual openness. However, if every monitor is see-through, you would find yourself facing practical problems immediately after you start working with one of them. When you are writing e-mail, everything you do will be exposed to people in the backside. Lack of privacy is an inevitable drawback in transparent displays because people should have same images on both sides, which results lateral inversion problem. Lateral inversion can also cause a tricky problem especially when we utilize a transparent display for face-to-face collaboration as in TransWall [Heo et al. 2013]. Text on transparent displays can be read comfortably from one side, but would be hardly readable from the other side. Transparent displays have great potential to be widely used in the near future, but the lack of privacy and lateral inversion might restrict its application. However, what if we have a display which is see-through yet opaque while it displays totally different images on two different sides of the screen? We named the display JANUS.