- Now you see the camera, now you don't

Now you see the camera, now you don't.

Yeah, OnePlus is doing something new this year.

(gentle music)

OnePlus is unveiling a phone here at CES,

but you're not gonna be able to go and buy it.

It's just a concept phone.

In fact, that's what it's called.

The OnePlus Concept One.

And the idea behind this phone, with its black glass strip

and its orange papaya stitched leather body

is that they can hide the cameras with this glass

that can electronically switch

between opaque and transparent.

The idea is that it just makes the phone look nicer,

because instead of seeing a bunch of camera lenses,

you see a black pane of glass.

(gentle music)

OnePlus says that they can switch between opaque

and transparent in .7 seconds,

which is about the time it takes

to open the camera app in the first place.

So that's cool, I guess.

Actually, actually it is pretty cool.

But this new technology has a practical use too

because you can set it to be a neutral density filter.

So when you're outside taking a shot

of something really bright,

it makes the glass a little bit darker

so that all your photos or videos

aren't completely blown out.

To use a neutral density filter,

you have to go into Pro Mode on the camera app.

When you do, you'll see a little button that says ND8.

You tap that, and it toggles the density filter on and off.

You can't adjust how, you know, strong or opaque it is,

but it does seem to work.

The room we were in wasn't super bright,

but you could see a little bit of a difference.

Obviously, we're gonna need to fully test this thing

in order to say for sure,

but of course, we can't fully test this thing

because it's just a concept phone.

One more thing.

It's opaque, but it's not like opaque opaque.

If you tilt the phone around in the light a little bit,

even when the thing is supposed to cover the camera lenses,

you can still kinda see the camera lenses from time to time.

That's fine.

Again, this is just a concept.

OnePlus says that they have to do a lot more testing

before they can put it on a real production phone.

There's a lot of extra work that they have to do,

and you know what, this is silly, right?

They've been developing this thing for 18 months

just so that they can cover up the camera lenses on a phone.

And that might be necessary later on in the future

when we get to four, five, six camera lenses

in the back of the phone.

That could look really horrifying,

and so you might actually want this,

but right now, it's silly.

But this is what CES is for.

I mean, we saw a TV that rotates into portrait mode,

so yeah, they're allowed

to make something weird on a phone too.

So let's talk about how this actually works.

It is electrochromic glass,

which is two panes of regular old glass,

and then inside is an electrochromic layer

that can switch from transparent to opaque

when electricity is applied to it.

It's the same technology

that gets used on a lot of sunroofs,

in fact, it's the same technology

that gets used in McLaren sunroofs,

and OnePlus says they work with McLaren

to develop this technology and shrink it down to phones.

And shrinking it down is actually what took a lot of work.

They had to get the panes of glass

that sandwich it really, really thin,

and they had to get the electrochromic layer really,

really thin, and they had to make it all work faster

than it usually does when it's just on a sunroof.

So again, they say it can happen in .7 seconds,

and they manage to make this glass .35 millimeters thick,

which is, they claim,

the thinnest electrochromic panel ever,

and the fastest electrochromic panel ever.

Electrochromic is really hard

to say like four times in a sentence.

So why does this concept need to exist?

Is it really that important

to be able to cover up your camera lenses

or get a software-defined ND filter.

Well a software-defined ND filter

actually sounds pretty dope on a camera,

but what this is really for

is to convince you that OnePlus does innovation

and that OnePlus is super cool.

That's why they partner with McLaren.

That's why they use

like the McLaren papaya orange stitched leather.

It's their whole vibe, their whole ethos is to be cool,

and they think this looks cool,

and who am I to say they're wrong?

Hey everybody, thanks so much for watching.

We have a ton more videos from CES.

We've got that rotating TV,

we've got a extremely red Chromebook from Samsung,

and plenty more, so keep it locked to The Verge.