Lenovo this week showed off a new smartwatch concept at its own Lenovo Tech World conference in Beijing, China. Called the Magic View smartwatch, it incorporates a second display called the Virtual Interactive Display (VID) that juts out below the case and over the wrist band. It is designed to solve both display and privacy issues.
How effective can this tiny display be? Lenovo believes that it could give the illusion of images twenty times larger than possible on a regular watch face. To accomplish this, the display has to be held up close to the eye. The motion unfortunately appears awkward and less than practical.
The video below better illustrates how the Lenovo Magic View smartwatch would work:
The current prototype runs on a custom version of Android rather than Android Wear and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor. It is roughly the same size as the Moto 360, albeit thicker, even sporting the same “flat tire” bar at the bottom of the display. The displays are powered by the Qualcomm Adreno 306 GPU.
As it stands, the concept of a secondary display that only you could see is certainly an interesting idea. Personal messages or passwords would not pop up on the main display for everyone to see but would remain quickly available to you alone.
It will be interesting to see where Lenovo takes this Magic View concept next.